Customer Service at Heart of TVH Growth Strategy

“Sorry, our entire budget went to excellent customer service.” That’s what the new billboard on TVH’s headquarters in Waregem—looking out on motorway E17—says. The global supplier of parts and accessories for material handling and industrial equipment is known for its witty billboards, that are always designed in-house. But never before has one been this popular on social media. What’s more, it perfectly summarises TVH’s ambition for the coming years: optimising customer experience (CX).

It was with this ambition in mind that TVH established a new division last year: Customer Experience. “This dedicated CX team brings together experts from different fields in order to put CX at the heart of our business,” said Silke Verfaillie, Global CX Manager at TVH. “We’ll be concentrating on e-commerce and digitisation, yet every single employee contributes to an ideal customer experience.”

Customer centricity
TVH has been expanding its customer experience strategy. In 2018, for example, the company launched its worldwide Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme, with which it collects customer feedback and brings its services in line with growing and changing expectations. TVH also carries out monthly customer satisfaction surveys and uses actual customer reviews as a basis for improvement before launching updates and novelties.

“We’ve made the shift from inside-out to outside-in thinking,” Silke Verfaillie elaborated. “We strongly believe that customer value creation, customer orientation and customer experience are the keys to success. On that account, we’re setting expectations right, both ours and—in the interest of transparency—those of our customers.”

E-commerce, digitisation and innovation
TVH is growing its digital team within Customer Experience, which then will further set up a new e-commerce platform and optimise TVH’s online presence. Meanwhile, there will be new features added to the existing customer platform based on customer feedback.

“We want to make the customer journey as smooth as possible,” explained Silke Verfaillie. “Yes, we want to offer a best-in-class webshop through an innovative e-commerce platform, but we’re innovating on many other levels as well. Even just having a Customer Experience division makes us a trendsetter in Belgium.”

CX as the engine of TVH
Clearly, TVH has ambitious plans for this year and beyond. “In order to consolidate CX as the engine of our company, we’re investing in extra colleagues with specific expertise in e-commerce, Voice of the Customer and data, for example,” said Silke Verfaillie. “We’re looking for customer-oriented people that identify with our corporate culture.” See all job openings on www.lift-your-career.com.