By Gordon Weiler
Over the years, Daman has evolved—as most companies do—from being production-oriented to being engineering-oriented, then evolving on to being sales and marketing-oriented. The goal is to build upon the competencies required for each of those phases and develop skills that ultimately lead to becoming customer-oriented. This means developing the capacity to offer customized solutions and communicate directly to each customer’s needs.
While this sounds like an impossible task, today’s technology offers many opportunities to learn individual customer patterns and needs when it comes to products and services. Daman Analytics offers a powerful dashboard that can drill down to specific customer data in terms of buying trends, products, and industry areas of focus. This gives us the power to tap into the behaviors and needs of each customer and begin a dialogue about how to continuously improve.
This customer-oriented view is required for each distributor to feel heard and know that they are meaningful to the Daman family. For instance, in our current Voice of The Customer survey, we are learning so far that of the 201 early respondents, 89.6 percent of our customers Agree or Totally Agree that Daman understands their needs. While that sounds acceptable, 61% Totally Agree. By our standard, that number should exceed 80%. Of the same customers, 80% state they Totally Agree that they are satisfied with Daman, while 17% Agree, totaling 97%. While potentially impressive, the results suggest that while we are satisfying customers, it is not necessarily due to understanding their specific needs at the same level which we are satisfying them. Perhaps specific products and services which they prefer over other competitors are simply meeting their needs. However, perhaps we are not quite yet honed in to what is important to them.
Thus, our goal in 2020 is to strive toward achieving a more customer-centric mindset and focus on having more conversations about future distributors’ needs and the solutions that we can develop to make them feel more understood in the months and years ahead.
Today, based on recent customer feedback, here are some of the current initiatives that have been added to Daman’s portfolio of distributor offerings:
Daman’s Creative Team has increased the pipeline of new product developments to include large port tapping plates and many other product line extensions that have proven to increase volume for Daman by over 7% in the past two years.
Evolution of a Manifold Case Study
Filter Integrated Cartridge Manifold solution
Daman assembly and hydraulic testing capabilities
Daman access to valve lines to help distributors resolve valve availability issues
Daman expedited shipping program to assist with urgent breakdown issues
Large manifold capabilities up to 20,000 pounds
Quick Block configurator for header and junction blocks
DamanWorks 2.0 – Live inventory and 3D models available online
E-Commerce product information package that can be download to help distributors with adding manifold products to their online catalogs
20% increase in our Design Team capacity by adding new team members to be more available to distributors
If you have more ideas about potential solutions that Daman can help solve, please click here and complete the form to let us know how the Daman team can better serve you.