Achieving Service Quality Through Distribution Quality in customer service is not often viewed as a function of distribution and warehousing. In today's world of shrinking margins and increased competition, quality and meeting customer needs must built into every process. How often and how many of your customers' needs your company satisfies is called service quality. Designing and implementing a distribution system with service quality in mind can ensure your products and services meets customer needs on time, every time and always to their satisfaction. Quality is an integration of the features and characteristics which determine the extent to which your company's products and services satisfies the customer's needs.
Service quality is often unique for each customer.
Some proven techniques to uncover customer's needs are focus groups, questionnaires, feedback from sales representatives and senior management interviews with the most important customers. Although, customers in different industries have different requirements, there are common themes in distribution. In distribution organizations customers can be broken into two groups, the end user or person who bought the product from you and the intermediaries who get the product to the end user. The intermediaries are the people who deliver the product to your customers. These people are often internal customers, that is your own delivery personnel.