Howdy All,
One of the advantages of my placing my office in the front portion of our Westfield office, is that I often get to hear customer comments and/or questions that stop in the office. When customers stop in, my ears often “open up” and I like to listen to what they have to say, and more importantly how my staff responds to their needs.
This post is inspired by a situation that happened today. This afternoon, a customer stopped in and was inquiring about why she received a delivery. She was an auto delivery client on our budget program. The customer thought that we were trying to make more money from her, because the prices over the last week have fallen, and this customer thought we were trying to “squeeze” a delivery in before the prices went down any further. I have heard this (erroneous) theory from people before, so I am going to try and put this to rest in a public setting.
Prices have absolutely no bearing on when we make a delivery. I actually mention this briefly in the website text. We keep the same margins no matter what the price does. When wholesale prices go up, our daily posted price goes up… When wholesale prices go down, our daily price goes down. However, our delivery schedule remains constant. We deliver using the industry standard degree day system. (eventually, I am going to post exactly what that all means)
The quick synopsis of when auto-clients get a delivery goes like this. Every auto-del customer has a next degree day delivery date. (this gets determined by several factors, I will explain in further detail in a future post) The next degree day (which is printed on every ticket by the way) is the most important number that determines when a customer gets a delivery. We have a degree day computer in the office, which constantly updates based on the weather… The heat and heat/hot water numbers on that computer are entered into the main scheduling software on a daily basis. (today’s numbers were 6163/7104) We print auto tickets every day (less in the summer months)… pulling ahead slightly based on the degree days. ( I just looked at our computer and our last pulls were 6092/7200. Which actually means we are behind slightly in the Heat Only category…but considering it is 90 degrees outside, the Heat only side isn’t as critical right now)… We pull ahead slightly because tickets have to go thru credit review, then go into the delivery schedule for the upcoming days.. (since we are not in the same areas all the time). In the winter, we may pull 300 degree days ahead, because so many degree days accumulate per day, and that is required to get an accurate delivery schedule… The last thing we want to do is run a customer out of oil. So there it is.. the very brief overview of how we determine delivery dates… (It is actually much more involved, but this is a blog.. and not a thesis)
So now that you know how we deliver, you can see why customer x theory above is just blatently absurd. If a) we were trying to make more money, why would we even lower prices? b)If we knew exactly what oil prices were going to do on any given day, why wouldn’t we just invest in oil commodities and not even bother delivering to people! We would be gazillionaires…which is not even a word, I know, but the point remains the same… if we had a crystal ball and knew exaclty what the prices were going to do, we really would be wealthy people. There is no crystal ball! There is a reason the word speculation is in the oil market, a word you hear all the time. NO ONE can tell you exaclty what the oil market is going to do on any given day. All you can do is make a guesstimate! c) I couldn’t even imagine how to devise such a scheme, especially with the amount of auto customers we service (about 3,500). The amount of time and man hours we would have to spend going thru all those accounts, and innefficiencies associated with such a delivery scheme.. would certainly negate the few pennies per gallon you might make d) The whole theory just sounds wrong and unethical. There is a reason we have the BBB seal showing on our website!
Now I am NOT calling our customer(s) stupid,idiot(s),clueless or anything else bad. Please don’t misinterprate what I am trying to say here. I like our customers. I really want to get to know them better. I know without them I wouldn’t have a job, so it is certainly in my and my families best interest to listen to their needs and help them as best we can! That was a big reason I started this blog. I really wanted a good medium to meet people and to try to educate them about us. However, I have noticed that since energy prices have climbed so much, many people are in panic mode, many are scared and are genuinly worried about how they are going to provide for their families! I can’t tell you what the future will bring, but I can tell you that we will be here to help you with whatever gets thrown at us all.
