Your Product Isn’t What You Think It Is

When I started at Grainger working in the warehouse, products to me were the things I picked, packed, and shipped every day. Bearings, fasteners, electrical components—concrete items moving from shelves to boxes to trucks. 

As I progressed in my career and moved to other distributors, something clicked. The products we sold at Grainger? They were the same products we were selling at my new company. Same manufacturers. Same specifications. Same availability. 

What was different? The experience we brought to customers. And that’s become the only real differentiator in today’s world. 

The Evolution from Transactions to Touchpoints 

Moving up through operations and into leadership roles, my perspective shifted again. It became less about individual transactions and more about how we were delivering experience across all the touchpoints in our business. That’s the real win in any customer experience work you do. 

You need to understand all the points where your customer touches your business and know how each one is performing. Here’s the thing that keeps executives up at night: you can have an amazing experience up front with placing an order and receiving a delivery, but if you have a not-so-great experience on the back end when the customer wants to pay the invoice, all the work you’ve done up front has completely fallen apart because that one touchpoint failed. 

I’ve seen it happen. A distributor invests in improving quote turnaround times, trains their counter staff to be more responsive, optimizes their delivery routes for speed. All good work. Then customers hit accounts receivable with a billing question and suddenly they’re waiting three days for a call back or dealing with an inflexible credit policy. One weak link in the chain undermines everything else. 

The Two Ways Customer Experience Initiatives Fail 

I’ve lived through both extremes of how companies approach customer experience measurement, and both miss the mark. 

At Grainger, we did surveys every quarter. The consistency was there—we measured religiously. But much of what we got back wasn’t actionable. We’d see scores, we’d track trends, but we didn’t have clear direction on exactly what to fix or where to focus. Good information, collected regularly, but not translating into concrete operational improvements. 

At another company I worked for, we went the opposite direction. We’d do surveys occasionally when someone decided it was time. No consistent rhythm. No follow-through. And we shouldn’t have been shocked that we never got any better—we weren’t measuring consistently, and when we did measure, the insights weren’t specific enough to drive action. 

Both approaches fail for the same fundamental reason: they’re missing the continuous improvement loop. It’s not enough to measure frequently if you don’t know what to do with the data. And it’s not enough to get actionable insights if you only measure once and never verify whether your changes actually worked. 

The Measurement Cycle That Actually Works 

Real progress comes from a complete cycle: measure what matters to customers at each touchpoint, analyze the results to identify specific operational gaps, implement targeted improvements based on those findings, then measure again to verify those changes moved the needle—and sustain the gains you’ve made. It’s continuous. It’s actionable. And it’s the only way to systematically improve customer experience rather than just tracking it. 

Just today, I was reviewing results with a distributor who’s been following this approach. Eighteen months ago, their Net Promoter Score was 61—already really good performance by industry standards. But they didn’t rest on that. They continually and systematically measured to get better. They identified specific gaps between what customers valued and how they were performing, made targeted operational adjustments, measured again to confirm improvement, and then built those improvements into their standard operating procedures. Their latest score? 73. They went from good to exceptional by treating experience as a continuous improvement process, not a one-time achievement. 

That kind of sustained improvement isn’t unusual when distributors actually commit to the full cycle. We typically see 12 to 18% improvement in customer satisfaction scores within the first year for companies that measure consistently, get actionable insights on what specifically to fix, implement those changes, and measure again to track progress. 

But here’s where many companies stumble: they make improvements and see scores rise, then assume the work is done. Six months later, performance slides back. Why? Because they didn’t sustain the improvements. The cycle isn’t measure-analyze-improve-done. It’s measure-analyze-improve-sustain-measure again. You need to lock in the gains by updating training materials, revising standard procedures, and continuing to monitor performance so improvements become permanent rather than temporary fixes. 

The pattern is consistent: identify the specific touchpoints where performance lags what customers actually care about, make concrete operational changes, verify those changes moved the needle, build them into your ongoing operations, then start the cycle again. Not measurement for measurement’s sake. Not occasional surveys that gather dust. A real loop that drives lasting improvement. 

One distributor told us recently that their customer satisfaction metrics have become “our barometer of what to do.” Not a nice-to-have data point filed away somewhere. The actual guide for resource allocation and operational priorities—measured consistently, acted on specifically, sustained through process changes, and verified through the next measurement cycle. 

The Real Product Sitting on Your Shelf 

Walk into any distribution warehouse and you’ll see rows of products. But talk to the customers who keep coming back, and they’ll tell you something different. They’re not buying your ball bearings. They’re buying the fact that when their production line goes down at 4:30 on a Friday, you answer the phone. They’re buying the reality that your inside sales team knows their operation well enough to catch a potentially wrong order before it ships. They’re buying the seamless experience from quote to delivery to invoice. 

They’re buying every interaction they have with you. 

This isn’t just intuition. When you measure what drives customer loyalty—asking them to rate not just their overall satisfaction but the importance and performance of specific touchpoints like delivery precision, quote turnaround, credit flexibility, and billing accuracy—patterns emerge. The companies that excel at the handful of things customers truly care about across the entire journey? They keep those customers. The ones that excel at one or two touchpoints but fail at others? Well, price becomes the tiebreaker. 

What This Means for Your Operation 

Here’s where most distribution companies get stuck. They invest millions in inventory, hundreds of thousands in warehouse automation, significant capital in fleet vehicles. All critical investments. But then they treat customer experience like an afterthought—something the customer service department handles when there’s a problem. 

That’s backwards. 

Your inventory management system tells you exactly how many units of each SKU you’re carrying. But can you tell me with the same precision how long customers wait on hold? How many times the average buyer has to call to get an order update? How satisfied they are with your billing process? Whether your credit terms align with what matters to them? 

The distributors winning in competitive markets treat customer experience with the same rigor they apply to inventory turns and fill rates. They measure it systematically—tracking not just whether customers are satisfied overall, but which specific capabilities matter most to them at each touchpoint and where performance gaps exist. They get actionable insights that point to concrete fixes. They implement those improvements. They sustain those changes by embedding them into standard procedures. Then they measure again to verify progress holds. 

A distributor might discover their Arizona branch has slow quote turnaround times that don’t exist in California. They address it by revising the quoting workflow. Six months later, they measure again to confirm Arizona’s performance improved. Then they update training materials and performance metrics to sustain the improvement. Or they find that construction customers rate them lower than manufacturing customers on delivery precision. They adjust delivery processes for construction accounts, train drivers on the new standards, and track whether satisfaction actually moved—and stayed there. 

These aren’t massive strategic problems requiring complete overhauls. They’re specific, fixable issues at individual touchpoints that directly impact whether customers stay or leave—and the only way to know if your fixes actually worked and stuck is to keep the measurement cycle going. 

The Interchangeable Product Problem 

When products become commodities, purchasing behavior shifts. Price matters, but it stops being the only thing that matters. 

A purchasing manager facing identical products at similar prices will choose the distributor that makes their job easier across the entire transaction. The one that provides accurate order tracking. The one whose team responds to emails within an hour instead of a day. The one that handles returns without an interrogation. The one whose billing is straightforward and whose credit team understands their business cycles. 

Your competition isn’t just other distributors anymore. It’s Amazon Business setting expectations for same-day delivery transparency. It’s consumer experiences training buyers to expect real-time updates and frictionless transactions at every step. 

The gap between what customers experience in their personal lives and what they tolerate in B2B transactions is closing fast. 

What Changes Monday Morning 

Stop treating customer experience as something you understand intuitively and start measuring it with the same discipline you apply to financial metrics. But don’t just measure—make sure you’re getting actionable insights that tell you specifically what to fix. Ask customers what matters most to them at each stage of doing business with you, then track how you’re actually performing on those specific dimensions across every touchpoint. 

Then—and this is the part most companies skip—actually do something about what you learn. Make targeted operational adjustments based on clear priorities. Build those changes into your standard procedures so they stick. And measure again in six months to see if those changes moved the needle and held. That’s the continuous improvement loop that actually works. 

The insights won’t require a complete business transformation. More often, they’ll point to specific operational adjustments at particular touchpoints that have outsized impact on retention. Maybe it’s integrating customer feedback directly into your CRM so your sales team sees it in real time. Maybe it’s identifying that your Milwaukee customers are genuinely satisfied across the board while your Phoenix customers love your sales team but struggle with inventory availability. Maybe it’s discovering that your accounts receivable process is the weak link undermining otherwise strong performance. 

These aren’t abstract improvements. They’re concrete changes that protect revenue—but only if you have consistency in measurement, actionable insights that tell you what specifically to improve, and the discipline to sustain those improvements through process changes and ongoing monitoring. 

Your products are increasingly interchangeable. Your experience across every touchpoint doesn’t have to be. But you need the complete cycle: measure consistently, get actionable insights, implement specific improvements, sustain those gains, and measure again to verify progress holds. 

Are you measuring customer experience consistently enough to track real trends? Are your measurements telling you specifically what to fix? And when you make improvements, are you building them into your operations so they last? 

That’s the difference between a measurement program and a continuous improvement system that actually protects revenue.