“I’m glad it’s you making the delivery today, most drivers
don’t offer much assistance” Clare said with a smile
That quote comes from a receiver I’ve come to know very well
over the past several years. He owns a small retail furniture business in
southern Manitoba. I always call ahead when I deliver to him so he can arrange
for help to unload his shipment. On this day he was short on staff leaving the
two of us to get the job done. It wasn’t much of an inconvenience on this day
because it was a light shipment. Besides, over the years our relationship
developed based on generosity & gratitude. I gave generously of my time
& labour, he was grateful. In the days prior to the opening of our Winnipeg
terminal his shipment was usually the last of the day on my wagon, he would
accept delivery late into the evening being very generous with his time. In
these instances it was my turn to be grateful. He respected my time and effort.
Over the 17 years I have been driving customer service is
rarely, if ever, talked about within the driving ranks. Yet how we relate to
shippers & receivers has a direct impact on our time and our trip plan. I
don’t ever recall sitting in a safety
meeting and having a discussion about our customers and how the drivers one on
one relationship with them impacts the drivers daily life and in turn, the
fortunes of the company. I’ve always found this odd. I’m payed by the mile and
by the drop. Why aren’t we talking about how to make good use of my time? That
time is totally dependent on the relationship I have with shippers &
receivers. Shouldn’t we be talking about those relationships and how to
leverage them?
I think this topic is the Achilles heel of the trucking
industry. Why? Because developing people skills and the productive professional
relationships that go along with them is incredibly difficult in an environment
where the drivers’ performance cannot be observed and coached. We have to face
the fact that in the past people skills were developed organically across the
trucking industry by smaller often family run trucking companies. Successful
customer service skills were not taught but were demonstrated to new drivers by
experienced drivers and the founders of the company. Customer service wasn’t
called customer service in this environment but was probably known as showing
respect, hard work, commitment, generosity, etc. These positive work ethics are
known to most drivers in the industry as old school values. These are the
foundational values that build strong interpersonal relationships with shippers
& receivers – customers – and lead to higher productivity for the
individual driver.
It seems that the expectation of many drivers today is that
their responsibility ends when they bump the dock. This attitude is re-enforced
by many large companies that recruit drivers with the tag line, ‘no touch
freight’. All you have to do is drive, your responsibility ends there. But this
re-enforces the short term view of return on investment. Personal relationships
and the benefits that come along with them are not short term projects. The
payoff is in the long term.
Where I work we deal with floor loads of commercial
furniture shipped to dealers across Canada. Often I will have to deliver a load
of 300-400 pieces of furniture to a single stop. On occasion there is only one
individual receiver plus myself to unload the freight. Usually there is more
manpower than that but sometimes not. Do I sit in the cab all day and wait or
do I invest some unpaid time and assist? Many drivers will not expend the
effort because they are not being financially compensated for the work. I won’t
disagree with that position. But what I will say is that because I deal with
these individual receivers on an ongoing basis a situation such as this
presents a golden opportunity to be generous with my time and effort and earn
their gratitude in return. That gratitude and respect we have the opportunity
to earn in these situations pays off in spades down the road. When the
opportunity arises for that shipper or receiver to repay the gratitude you
earned with a generous act of their own, they will, making your life easier by
valuing your time as something important. That friends, is money in the bank.
But the real value I find in taking the time to invest and
build relationships with people I may only see two or three times a year comes
in the greeting I receive when I walk through the door. More often than not I
am greeted with a smile by people that are genuinely glad to see me. That is
priceless.
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