Andy Wright: What do customers want?

It seems like only yesterday that I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 22-year-old entering the sector as a sales engineer, wondering what my career had in store for me.

I don’t feel 57 years old; I still feel like that 22-year-old (sometimes), but as I look back on the last 35 years, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Andy Wright, executive chair, Vital Power Group

Over the years, I have carried out numerous large-scale customer surveys that have tried to quantify exactly what it is that our customers want from us and what are the things that we need to improve if we are to become a valued and trusted rental partner.

Regardless of who I have been working with or which products I have been involved in renting out, the result of all those surveys have always delivered the same answers.

Every single one of them has identified the same three things as being the most critically important features of the rental service that we are trying to deliver.

The key components

So, what are the three magic ingredients that are the most important components of delivering a world-class service for our customers?

Well, it may surprise some people that one factor that never features in the top three is ‘price’.

Of course, customers will always say that the price they pay is important, and of course it is. We all know that, and we all experience this as a customer both at work and in our personal lives.

But when you ask them anonymously about what the most important things are that they consider when choosing a supplier, price has never been in the top three in my experience. Often, it is not even in the top five!

So, what are the three components that rental customers expect to see from us if we want to deliver great service? In no particular order:

Availability – Customers want their chosen product to be available when they want it. The whole point behind the very existence of the equipment rental sector is driven by the fact that our customers can’t commercially justify the ownership of equipment all of the time; so, they rent it.

But they need it when they need it, and the best rental companies will more often than not have the product available when it’s requested.

The industry has come a long way from the days of preparing equipment once the hire is confirmed. Now, it needs to be on the shelf or in the yard and available for hire.

I’ve found that an important measure to focus on in this area is what I would call ‘time from off-hire to available’, which considers the quality of your logistic function to return equipment promptly as well as the ability of your engineering teams to turn around off-hired equipment and make it available again. Great businesses can do this within a very short time.

The other by-product of great availability is, of course, high utilization, reduced capital spend and a positive impact on cash within the business.

Reliability – It stands to reason that customers want the equipment that they have hired from you to work when they need it to, but how many times do we see equipment breaking down on the first two or three days of operation?

Too many times, in my view. Is this even something that you measure? If not, it should be. Uptime is a critical measure for any business and it’s becoming increasingly important as the time pressure to complete

When asked for the most important factors when choosing a rental source, price is rarely in the top three factors for customers, according to Wright. (Photo: Adobe Stock)

work continues to grow.

The provision of data to customers to prove the quality of our performance in this area is critical, so adding telematics to your equipment and integrating your available data is adding a new dimension to this key customer requirement. This is only going to become more important over time.

Ease – This focuses on the ease of doing business with you and is always a top three requirement from customers. Customers want a no-hassle, precise, reliable service from their equipment providers, supported by technology to make it as efficient as possible.

They also want honesty and integrity when things don’t go to plan, and for problems to be resolved quickly. This is often driven by the culture of a business, which is formed by its shared values, delivered by like-minded individuals.

The world is changing fast, but some things never change, and these three critical service levers have consistently been in the top three customer requirements for the past 35 years of my career. I predict that they will still be the top three in another 35 years.

IRN columnist Andy Wright, formerly CEO of Sunbelt Rentals UK, is the executive chair of Coventry-based power specialist Vital Power Group.