Your phone is silent. In fact, it hasn't rung all day. Your global customer service team is filling orders that will arrive in three or maybe four weeks and answering customer concerns that were submitted a month earlier. It's just a typical day in customer service for a company that specializes in the production and sales of manufacturing tools and equipment. But don't worry, your company isn't going out of business. It's just 1962.
Customer service and business in general was managed quite differently fifty years ago and no one knows this better than Trevor Howse. Trevor Howse is one of Atlas Copco’s longest-working employees and he’ll quickly put you at ease about the quiet phones. See, in 1962, customer service was done primarily through the mail.
Howse started his long career in the mailroom of the London office of Chicago Pneumatic, later acquired by Atlas Copco in 1987.
“I wasn’t sure I’d stay there, but I worked every night to get the mail out and got recognized,” said Howse.
The managing director noticed Howse’s hard work in the mailroom and offered him a job in customer service in the overseas department. Instead of fielding calls from all over the world, the customer service department dealt in letters, then telegrams, then finally the telephone call.
When he started, Howse’s typical customer service activities involved delivering handwritten orders to the typing pool where they’d be typed up and processed. With the invention of the Dictaphone, Howse’s activities were set out in the morning and there were no interruptions—his day involved taking orders and providing delivery information. And handling the occasional emergency.
“A ferry sank off the coast of New Zealand and it was, ‘We need tools now!’” Howse recalls. “Chicago Pneumatic had an underwater tool and my job was to get those tools together and fly them out there. Today, every order gets this level of attention and priority.”
The times, they are a’changin’
When Howse started working in the overseas department, there were two factories in Scotland and no distribution centers. Overseas orders were consolidated and shipped just once a week—it took six weeks to ship an order on a boat to Australia or New Zealand. In his current role as general manager of Atlas Copco’s North America Distribution Center in Charlotte, N.C., Howse and his team makes sure every air order printed by 6 p.m. goes out the same day and is delivered overnight.
Howse has seen a lot of changes but he says the biggest shift is in business relationships.
“Everything then was plain and straightforward. Today, we work in a more demanding and less forgiving environment.”
But Howse has always rolled with the changes as they come. And that’s probably why he’s been so successful over the past fifty years.
“All of these changes happen and you don’t really even realize it – you just go with it.”
We’ll feature more insight into the past fifty years at Atlas Copco from employee, Trevor Howse, in an upcoming blog post. In the meantime, tell us your story.
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