At the end of 2019 it was extraordinarily encouraging to receive an email with positive feedback from our Core Customer, Travis Perkins, UK’s largest builders’ merchant, which very explicitly evidences that daily engagement in delivering a Superior Customer Experience is indeed making the difference. Furthermore, it clearly proves that not only what we do, but also how we do things matters, and that it has a positive impact promoting CEMEX’s broader offering beyond blocks. The email was a tribute to two sales employees, Hannah Plimmer and Samantha Leigh:

“Just a quick email about 2 members of your staff.  Sam and Hannah are 2 of the most pleasant people to deal with I’ve ever known, they both are always quick to respond or call me back, nothing seems too much trouble and can usually come up with a solution to my ridiculous requests no problem.

Consequently, CEMEX are now getting around 80% of my block orders DTS and we have swapped a few branches over to your concrete common business too.  I just wanted to say thanks for everything and to let you know of their efforts too.”  Ian.

Ian controls the direct deliveries to sites for Travis Perkins for a number of the Midland branches – he shops around for the best prices as the main contact for the contractors and then he puts the work through one of his branches, dependent on their numbers at the time.

Feedback from the customer was that he has struggled finding his preferred supplier over the years as where one falls down another excels and vice versa, so he would usually just pick whoever gave the cheapest price regardless of service or quality. However, he has said that he would now actively lower his own margins to use CEMEX as Sam and Hannah have made it so much easier for him, alongside our good quality product and next day lead times.

His prices are communicated from Sam and Hannah directly to the office so that the transition for him from placing an order to receiving an order is pretty seamless, and due to our good lead times out of Buxton he gets good quality blocks on the dates he requires.

Sam and Hannah speak to Ian on a daily basis as he wants to put as much of his work over to CEMEX as possible, understandably, other suppliers come in to certain areas a lot cheaper and he is unable to justify the cost difference, however, he is very open when talking about this. As a result, a lot of Travis Perkins branches have called Sam and Hannah over the last 9-12 months off the back of Ian talking about CEMEX to them and enquired about yard rates for their own branches, so it has resulted in winning other Travis Perkins branch work that doesn’t fall into Ian’s area.

	According to Hannah Plimmer, Area Sales Manager Distributors Concrete Products UK: “If you have a positive attitude and try your best people can tell and want to work with you, this develops into a relationship and in turn it doesn’t just become about the price.”
	In Samantha’s Culshaw, Area Sales Manager Concrete Products UK, opinion:“In a very challenging market, building these relationships over my past eight years and getting this kind of feedback is a great feeling. It all goes towards how important our Sales Manager roles are for growth in Concrete Products.”

Let’s go above and beyond to maintain an ongoing relationship with our customers. Customer Experience should be created in the everyday moments, woven into every fibre of our company culture, where going the extra mile is a way of life.