​Parker advancing customer focus at less-than-truckload leader Saia

While, over his more than three decades in business-to-business sales, Michael C. “Mike” Parker has seen plenty of change in how purchasing decisions are made, he believes the need for a customer-centric approach has never been greater. Applying his B2B acumen to his role as vice president for marketing and customer service at Saia Inc., Parker recognizes that people are the No. 1 asset of the less-than-truckload, nonasset truckload and logistic services firm, which operates 147 terminals in 34 states. Sitting down with the American Journal of Transportation at Saia’s headquarters in the Atlanta suburb of Johns Creek, Ga., Parker offers insights on the evolution of customer satisfaction and provides thoughts on service opportunities – from increasing reliability of intermodal options to potential for longer tandem trailer units.

How has Saia evolved into one of the nation’s most successful less-than-truckload carriers? It’s a combination of things. Certainly, longevity is a key element. Saia’s been around for over 90 years.  We have a workforce and leadership team that’s got long and deep experience in the industry and expertise, so that longevity of tenure of our people is a big piece of it. We’ve got a leadership team that’s been through the wars, been through the economic ups and downs, and really has done a marvelous job of navigating through those. And we’ve got brand awareness. The Saia brand is well-recognized, and the logo is very strong and been consistent over a long period of time. I’m a big believer in the power of consistency. I think consistency of message, consistency of people, consistency of approach all add up to the ability to be very good at what you do. But the most important asset we have is our people. In looking at all the research we’ve done over the years, consistently our customers say that one of our biggest strengths is our people. Whether it’s our customer service people, our salespeople, our drivers, anybody they interact with in Saia gets great marks from the customers. So I think it’s a consistent and strong message that we can leverage, and it’s a big part of what has gotten Saia to where we are today. Can you fill us in on Saia’s enhanced businesswide customer focus and associated implications you see? I’m really excited about that piece of what’s going on in Saia. It’s really a key reason of why I joined the Saia team.  At the same time as I was brought on, Saia created a new role of chief customer officer and appointed Ray Ramu to that role. Ray is a longtime Saia employee and has been in the industry for a long time. His role is, very simply, to be the customer’s advocate and the customer’s voice at Saia to all parts of the company. I just think it’s a really powerful message to our company and to the industry and to our customers that Saia is fully committed to being a customer-centric organization. I think our business strategy reflects what I just described, that, going forward, our focus is going to be on creating a superior customer experience and being a leader in customer satisfaction. Let’s shift gears a bit... What role do you see intermodal playing in Saia’s continuing growth? Intermodal certainly has a place in our transportation mix. One of the ways we use it today is to help with some of our more heavily imbalanced line-haul lanes. With our heavy focus on high-quality performance and customer satisfaction, we have to make sure that any of the options we choose can meet our time and quality requirements – and we are finding intermodal options to be increasingly dependable.  As Saia runs quite a lot of tandems, how have you been viewing the recent legislative efforts to allow twin 33-foot units nationwide? There are obvious financial benefits to Saia from allowing the use of 33-foot twin trailers, replacing 28-foot twins, so I think it is fair to say we are observing the legislative process with interest. That said, there remain a myriad of open questions, such as: Would the legislation provide for a corresponding increase in weight limit? And: To what level would this be embraced by state and local authorities? And lots of other questions, too, on a variety of fronts. The bottom line, I think, is that, while this has interesting potential, there are a lot of things that still need to be worked out.   How has your varied marketing background – most recently with specialized logistics firm CHEP and prior to that 10 years with the A.O. Smith water products firm and earlier 19 years with General Electric – helped prepare you for the position you assumed earlier this year with Saia? There’s a lot of common ground between the three companies I’ve been with prior and Saia in terms of the dynamics in play. A.O. Smith and GE’s appliance business are both large players in mature, highly competitive industries, which, if you think about it, sounds a lot like the place where Saia plays. While they’re manufacturers, the customer base for both A.O. Smith and GE appliance business are distributors, retailers, contractors – all not too different again from the kinds of customers we do business with at Saia, primarily a B2B environment. And I really think that’s the key: Understanding how to be successful in a highly competitive business-to-business environment is very transferable across industries. It’s about the success factor, taking care of your customers, and creating value by helping your customers to be successful. In B2B, I believe it’s all about how that business customer of yours can benefit from what you bring. How is what you do critical to their success, and how can you provide value in that context? How do you find ways to help your customers bring value to their customers? I don’t care what kind of business it is, they’re doing the same thing we are, which is trying to figure out how do they bring value to their customer base. If, as a supplier or vendor, we can help them do that, then we create a difference relative to our competition. My experience at CHEP gave me insight into the logistics industry, and, coming from a manufacturer, while taking care of customers is similar, there are unique elements to the logistics industry, and so the time at CHEP really shortened my learning curve here at Saia. At A.O. Smith, customer service reported to me, so I was the marketing leader and I was also the customer service leader. We took about a million calls a year at A.O. Smith, so it was a large customer service organization. Customer service is a big part of the LTL freight industry, no question. Customer satisfaction is the differentiator; customer service is a core element of that. If you haven’t done customer service before, you really don’t understand the dynamics. Every business is constantly challenged with figuring out how to deliver consistent high-quality service for your customers. You only remember customer service when it’s not good. When you think about it, you  realize how difficult it is with all the variables in place – training, staffing, call load, environmental things going on – if there’s a weather event, that drives our calls up for obvious reasons as people are wondering what’s going to happen with their freight... That makes it difficult to staff appropriately. That makes it difficult to anticipate surges in call load or other communications methods. You want to be proactive rather than reactive. The worst thing you can do in the customer service environment, in my view, is to be constantly reacting. I call it playing a game of whack-a-mole, where you’re never going to win. You need to get ahead of the curve. You need to be anticipating what is going to happen so that you’re ready when it does. For example, one of the things Saia started earlier this year was a chat option for our customers. They can go to the saia.com website and click on the “chat” button and be immediately connected with one of our customer service people. There’s no queue in chat. You get right in with somebody and communicate real-time and get things resolved very quickly.  We find a lot of our customers really prefer that method to being on the phone. It allows them to do other things while they chat with us. In our next wave of innovation, we’re looking to really expand our social media presence and interactive capabilities for those customers who like to interact that way – to be available to our customers however they want to reach us. How has your involvement in various marketing executive groups served you – and others? It’s been powerful. There’s so much change in the business-to-business world, in how buyers make decisions and how businesses market and communicate with other businesses, that getting together with other marketing and customer service leaders has been incredibly beneficial in sharing best practices or learning about best practices and sharing ideas. I have found it reassuring to know that most of my peers in business-to-business environments have the same issues I do – the same internal and external challenges, the same environmental evolutions that they’re dealing with. Fundamentally, it boils down to that the buyer is changing. The business-to-business buyer makes decisions differently than they did 10 years ago.  The old-school way of calling on businesses or developing a relationship with a business customer of, from a marketing standpoint, creating brochures or displaying at trade shows or having the field salespeople go make cold calls by knocking on doors – those don’t work as consistently as they used to. If you’re a buyer of LTL freight services or anything else, you have incredible amounts of information available to you. You can find out a lot about Saia. You can find out a lot about our competitors. You can find out a lot about alternatives. You’re no longer as reliant as a buyer on a salesperson from a vendor to inform you about things, because you’re doing that on your own, what I call self-education. Understanding how that plays into the decision process and the loyalty process is critical to marketing strategies. And so getting together with peers is very helpful in sharing best practices, sharing success stories. Really right now, it’s about helping them educate themselves, providing the opportunity for that buyer to learn about Saia and what we do and what makes us special and separate. Rather than telling them, we provide information that allows them to uncover that on their own. In your work, it’s probably a good thing you like travel, but how do you find time to pursue your other interests, such as golf, photography and reading? My golf game, which was never good, has suffered from serious neglect over the past couple years. That’s probably going to be one of my 2016 goals, to at least get my golf game back to a level where I’m not embarrassing myself – or not embarrassing myself as much. My wife and I moved to Atlanta about 2 1/2 years ago, and we’re empty-nesters now, and so we really spend a lot of time exploring and enjoying Atlanta. It’s such a neat city with so much to do – the great restaurants, the festivals every weekend, all the pro sports teams – there’s just so much to do. We moved here from Nashville, where I spent about 10 years while I was with A.O. Smith. While Nashville’s a great town, it doesn’t have the diversity and variety Atlanta has. Travel, frankly, whether it’s for business or personal, provides an opportunity to play with photography, and I get to read on planes. My last job, with CHEP, I traveled internationally a lot, and I don’t miss that. One trip to Australia in a lifetime is enough, I think.