Selling Direct Is Difficult, But Customer Service Goes A Long Way
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Customer service can make or break a direct-to-consumer farm business. Wayne Swanson of Swanson Family Farms says processing mistakes are inevitable, but how producers respond to those mistakes is what keeps customers coming back.
Swanson… “ My cut sheet did not change from 2010 until now. Once I honed in on what these people want to eat, that's what I delivered. And what that allowed me to do was to have muscle memory at the packing house. They're still going to mess up. Some new guy's coming in, he's going to cut something wrong. But I build in space, and you need to build in space if you're gonna jump into this arena, to fix the mistakes. You're just going to tell people, "Take it or leave it." I don't do that. I have time in between delivery that I can call somebody and say, ‘Hey John, they cut these ribeyes a quarter of an inch thin versus an inch, how about I give you more than what you need, and I throw some extra ground in there?’ As you grow, you're going to make mistakes, and the mistakes that you're going to make are gonna be valuable in the thousands of dollars to the people that—you're making the mistakes on people. I don't want anybody to not understand that every mistake you make in this business has a person attached to it. And if you can't handle that, this is not the business for you because there's going to be an issue every time you process.”
Once again, that’s Wayne Swanson of Swanson Family Farms.
