Along with some of my Brakke colleagues, we recently attended the KC Animal Health Corridor event. Kudos to the organizers as the show ran smoothly and gave an excellent opportunity for interaction between the various stakeholders. Attending these sort of events in my opinion is a good investment to improve animal health in all its iterations.
I read an article recently that the author talked about in the post COVID world, we are paying ‘5 Star prices for 2 Star service’. The author couldn’t be more right as we see prices go up dramatically but service goes down, almost at the same inverse proportion. Take travelling on airlines: prices for economy now are what we used to pay for first class. And good luck getting there on time, and God help you if you have a delay. That happened to me (like all of us) and you try to call in to get help – when after several instructions on key-padding info, they tell you to get on the website for faster service. Which you do, and then it tells you can’t do anything online – you need to call. Then you call back and they tell you the wait is anywhere from 45 minutes to 1.5 hours. Or you can experience AI by messaging a chatbot. Who tells you eventually they cannot do anything – you have to call.
On a recent flight that landed on time (late in the evening), there wasn’t enough help to bring the plane to the gate – nor offload – so we waited almost 1 hour. You get the impressions; and I’m sure all of you have similar or better (worse) stories.
The point of all of this is to raise awareness that in my view, customer service, meeting and exceeding expectations trumps all. And as important as innovation is (as we witnessed at the KC corridor event), we cannot forget the fundamentals of business – of which customer service is arguably the most important. How is your company doing? Are you measuring it correctly and setting plans to constantly improve? Maybe offering 5-star service for a 2-star price is the ultimate competitive advantage!
Paul Casady
English (United States) 
Portuguese