The mission of Goodmans is “to create great lifetime furniture experiences”. That mission is slyly provocative because of the word “lifetime”. Our teams spend a lot of energy discussing the difference between just a “great furniture experience” and a “great lifetime furniture experience”. Specifically, this is the difference between “Day One” of a furniture project versus “Day Two”. Day One is from the moment a customer walks in the door until the day they receive their furniture. We assert that most of our competitors are competent at Day One service but to us, that is only the beginning.

Day Two starts the day after the furniture is delivered and lasts as long at the customer owns the furniture; oftentimes another 15, 20 or 25 years. During Day Two, the customer needs our help for moves, adds, changes, adjustments, reconfigurations and repairs. The volume of Day Two transactions require us to maintain a large staff, even though the revenue per transaction is a fraction of the Day One order size. While we could be much more profitable if we emulated the Day One organizational structure of our competitors, we choose to do the right thing for our customers so we are built to support Day Two needs.

A great example of this is turn-around time for warranty service and repair. For almost every dealership, warranty / repair is a nuisance and not a focus. But since our mission requires us to think about “lifetime” experiences, we knew we had to reinvent the way we think about repair.

Whereas most dealerships take 4-6 weeks to resolve repairs, we have a goal that 55% of our repairs will be completed on the very first trip. This requires a great deal of coordination as well as a large, mobile inventory of commonly used parts. I am happy to say that for two years in a row we have exceeded that goal which means our customers spend less time waiting on parts and it is much less disruptive.

We have a third party survey our customers after installations and we have an annual goal of 97.5% customer satisfaction. We routinely exceed that goal.

View Goodman’s Interior Systems Excellence 2013 Year-to-Date Results