Thinking Like a Customer

Having joined Amtech in early December, there were three things that quickly became obvious to me as I engaged our customers and met with members of the Amtech team:

1. We have an incredibly knowledgeable and passionate team of professionals who want to make our customers successful.
2. Our products are top-notch and help many leading companies in the corrugated packaging industry successfully run their businesses, day in and day out.
3. Our internal processes and systems make it hard for our teams to accomplish the first two items on this list.

As we progress through 2023, my goal is to do absolutely nothing to disrupt points one and two, while putting an extreme amount of emphasis on fixing the third.

As a team, we’ve started to talk about "thinking like a customer." In short, "thinking like a customer" is a very simple concept: if you were the customer, how would you like to be treated? More broadly, it means taking the time to understand what our customers want, providing a consistent experience, and making it as easy as possible for our customers to work with us.

To be clear, "thinking like a customer" doesn’t mean always saying "yes." However, what it does mean is that we need to do a better job of defining what we’ll be delivering for our customers (and then delivering it), we need to help our customers get value from their Amtech solutions sooner, and we need to communicate with our customers before our customers coming looking for us.

It’s early in the process, but we’re already well down the path of implementing systems that will help us more effectively manage our own key business operations, better define roles and position our best people in the role where they can provide the greatest value, and tightening up how our teams work together to ensure our customers truly feel we are “One Amtech.”

It would be disingenuous of me to say all the necessary changes will happen overnight. Just like in your business, change can be tough, and it takes time. However, what I can commit to each of you is that we know where we need to get to and we know how we’re going to get there. Now it comes down to getting a little better every day. If we do that, I’m confident we’ll look back on 2023 as the year our delivery and support services became recognized as a true positive differentiator for us as a company, and most importantly, for our customers.

As Senior Vice President of Customer Operations, Bill and his teams are accountable for delivering a consistently positive experience for our customers, from the initial implementation of Amtech solutions, to technical support to ensure reliable performance, on through to the rapid resolution of any issues that may arise.