Rental Center: Equipped to serve
Equipment Depot’s employee experience program helps provide the best service to customers and improves job satisfaction.
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From Left to right: Carol Tesarek, director of customer experience; Chaundra Callaway, director of rental operations, and Hugh Parry, COO of Equipment Depot. |
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Employees are rewarded for a job well done with CX coins that can be traded for merchandise, gift cards or tickets to events. |
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“The thing I like about our Customer Survey Program is Equipment Depot customers are surveyed on every equipment rental,” says Chaundra Callaway, Equipment Depot’s director of rental operations. |
“We’re a service company first,” explains Hugh Parry, COO at Equipment Depot.
Equipment Depot is the largest independently operated material handling and aerial rental lift company in the United States with headquarters in Houston, Texas. It has more than 50 branches across 25 states and is on target to achieve $1 billion in sales by 2025.
Of that, 20 percent is attributed to material handling and aerial lift equipment rentals, where it has nearly $500 million invested in approximately 14,000 rental units. With 2,000 employees, almost half – 850 – are service technicians.
Parry says the company sets itself apart from other equipment service companies with a strategy that is backed up by extensive research. “Because we’re primarily a service company first, we spend a lot of focus on hiring and training the right people,” he says.
Core values
Parry says Equipment Depot is driven by its core values: A passion to perform, the trust and power to act, responsibility for those actions, and the enjoyment of what we do.
“We have a dedicated customer experience function. We track very closely how the customers feel about us. We use employee and customer experience surveys to drive, adjust and tweak our strategy to make sure that we keep raising customer and employee satisfaction. That’s our secret sauce. We do everything we can to deliver great service, delight our customers and then have employees who genuinely like working here.”
Carol Tesarek, Equipment Depot’s director of customer experience, heads up the Customer and Employee Experience for the company.
The customer experience
The team has developed a long-term strategy with a vision and a mantra, so everyone knows what they need to do every day to deliver an exceptional customer experience or CX,” Tesarek says.
We have successfully built an internal and external CX strategy from scratch,” says Tesarek. “Our CX Program is our Voice of Customer. We ask for feedback at every transaction, making sure we are delivering an outstanding customer experience. We provide immediate resolution to issues and we look at high-value improvements to the customer and bring the right process and technology to make that happen. We share our scores and recommendations with our executive team every month.”
Equipment Depot employees are a big part of this experience. So, to improve the employee experience and enhance internal engagement, Equipment Depot created an internal Employee Experience (EX) program that awards employees for delivering great customer experiences.
To develop the CX and EX programs, we talked with everyone in the company to better understand what our customers thought of Equipment Depot and then what the company needed to do to make the customer experience even better. “To start something like that, you can’t do it alone. You must ask your employees. We developed this program during COVID, so we had online virtual discussions with employees in every department across our footprint,” recalls Tesarek.
Part of the CX strategy is to engage with our employees and recognize those who have made a difference. “If we receive customer compliments, or their name is mentioned in a survey from a customer, or a manager notices them going above and beyond, that person gets rewarded. It could be a peer-to-peer recognition where a fellow employee publicly compliments another on a job well done, or it can take the form of coins that can be redeemed for merchandise or gift cards,” says Tesarek. Merchandise could be fishing or hunting gear, admission fee to spa or local music or art event, airline tickets, cruises, tools for technicians, or simply an Amazon gift card or Master/Visa debit card. In 2022, Equipment Depot won four U.S. Customer Services Awards by Awards International for its Customer Experience Program: Gold award for Best Measurement in Customer Experience and Best Customer Experience Strategy; Silver award for CX Leader of the Year to Carol Tesarek; and a Bronze award for Customer-Centric Culture for a Large Company.
Employee feedback is equally as important, Tesarek says. “We started conducting employee surveys in 2017 with a third party, AT Kearney, that handles surveys for hundreds of different companies.”
The internal survey crystalized what is important to employees. “Our employees care the most about the three things, in this order: The ability to develop personally; to make an impact on the strategy of the company; and the culture of the company,” Parry says.
Investment in training is a big part of the Equipment Depot strategy. “We have developed an extensive curriculum and our training managers use it to help employees develop and grow in their jobs. Employees really want to know what the company’s strategy is, how they connect to it and how they make an impact, so we spend a good amount of time talking about the strategy and sharing how we’re doing against the strategy,” Parry says. “Every leadership executive is really involved in promoting our culture. They are always out beating the drum and making sure that the culture is taking root and being established and growing and flourishing in all the different regions.”
Survey results
The strategy of polling employees is working. “About 60 percent of employees respond to any given survey we send out,” says Tesarek. “When we identify a flat spot in our responses in any region, we take the time and effort to plan and invest in those areas to improve our employee ratings. Time and again, we’ve seen our results improve.”
In 2019, the metrics on employee satisfaction was at 73 percent; in 2023, it has climbed to 83 percent, says Parry. “The third-party company, AT Kearney, that helps score surveys and manage this whole process, was just blown away. They’ve never seen anything like this. We were high in every question that we asked our employees. It was a huge compliment to hear that from a company that does this for a living. Although we haven’t specifically tied it back to employee retention, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to say that happy employees want to stay.”
Customer input
“We survey every customer in every book of business. For rental, we send a survey after they rented the equipment to make sure that we’ve met their expectations. We know firsthand and immediately where we’re doing well and where we could be better. On the rental side, customers like communication. They want their equipment delivered on time and they want it in working order. They want it serviced immediately if something happens to it. Then, they want it picked up in a timely manner when they are through with it.
“At Equipment Depot, every department is involved in rental. It’s not just running the equipment, making sure that piece of equipment gets out there and the customer is happy. I’m a big proponent of developing strong relationships with customers and from a rental perspective, it is what has kept our rental market strong. It is all about the relationships we have with our customers,” Callaway adds.
Training track
Equipment Depot salespeople develop their skills through a series of training programs the company has assembled over the years. “We teach our sales reps to be the kind of rep we want them to be. There is no lack of training in this organization and one of the most recent ones that we’ve incorporated is Dimension of Professional Selling (DPS) based on materials developed by Carew International. We now have certified trainers of Carew’s DPS sales development program on staff. I’m fortunate enough to be one of those trainers and we’re able teach them how we want them to sell so we’re all selling through the same type of process,” says Callaway.
The DPS training is a week-long class put on once a quarter with about 25 attendees. “We have had about 80 people complete it so far and we have several more classes scheduled through middle of 2024. It is a high priority to get all sales reps through those classes,” Callaway says.
Salespeople also go through OEM equipment safety training; service techs participate in OEM equipment repair and maintenance training.
Volunteer time
Another way Equipment Depot helps employees make a difference at work and in their communities is by supporting them in their local volunteer efforts. Every employee can donate up to 16 hours of work time to a local non-profit or organization on the clock. Often, branch employees work together with a local group to make a difference.
“These tend to be grass roots efforts initiated by those in the branch operations,” says Callaway. “Every branch has a person who heads up the volunteer effort, and they handle the logistics. We have a lot of local leadership, and we want them to have an outlet that’s paid for by the company where they volunteer their time and make a difference in the communities where they live and they work.”
This article originally appeared in the September-October 2023 issue of Pro Contractor Rentals magazine. ©2023 Urbain Communications LLC. All rights reserved.
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