Company focused on service after sale
Tom Edmonds -- Furniture Today, April 18, 2004
ARCHBOLD, Ohio — The service and support that Sauder provides its retailers and consumers likely would bring conventional furniture factories to their knees.
Converted to electronic data interchange long before that was a topic of discussion for most of the industry, Sauder, like its brethren in the ready-to-assemble furniture segment, warranties its products and provides extensive post-retail support.
Once the product is sold, consumers deal with Sauder, not the retailer.
The step-by-step assembly manuals that Sauder puts together are periodically tested by sixth graders from a local school. If the sixth graders can't figure it out, the manual is rewritten.
And Sauder operates a consumer call center for consumers who need assembly advice or repair parts. With 30 customer-service agents, the center fields as many as 2,500 calls a week, and an average of 6,000 repair parts are sent out each week.
The call volume has been decreasing as more consumers turn to the online instruction manuals Sauder posts on its Internet site.
The company backs its products up with a five-year, "bumper-to-bumper" warranty on residential furniture, with 10 years for office furniture.
"We view customer service as more of a sales department than a cost center," said President and CEO Kevin Sauder. "If we can produce mind-boggling results for the people who call, that customer is going to tell 20 people what this Sauder company did for her. If we make it difficult, they're going to tell just as many people what we didn't do for her."
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