Roberts Rules the Road

There's more. Before the NCs, customer-service teams didn't have an easy way to send or receive systemwide messages. If an express center closed or a section of highway was shut down because of bad weather, someone in Akron sent out an email message and hoped that everyone would stop what they were doing and switch screens to read it. Or an announcement came over the public address system. Or CAT leaders, known as facilitators, scribbled the message by hand on each team's board. Today a ticker tape scrolls across the screen with breaking news or important announcements. An up-to-the-minute weather map displays current road conditions, and an Internet window links team members to a Web site with help files on special needs, like how to handle a hazardous- material shipment.

"Before, it was as if we were working in watercolor - limited to two dimensions," says Greg Mulhollen, manager of operations planning. "Now we're working in clay."

The Customer Is King

Lots of companies claim to offer reliable service to their customers. Roberts guarantees it - and knows it delivers on that guarantee. The company is crazy about measuring performance. In the center of each CAT station stands a whiteboard propped on an easel. The boards tell everyone how the teams are doing. Each morning, a team member or a facilitator records the vital statistics from the day before: percentage of on-time pickups and deliveries, percentage of customer calls and service failures handled promptly. "Everybody likes to see where they stand," says Jeff Sitzlar, the facilitator for CAT 5.

But there's more at stake than team pride. These numbers determine how much money employees take home. Quarterly bonuses are based on whether a team meets, lags, or exceeds its service objectives. Current performance is compared with performance over the previous two years, with on-time delivery and phone service getting the most weight. "In CAT 2," says one team member, "on-time pickup numbers were down a month ago, to only around 92%. So the CAT took a look at that area and said, 'What can we do to fix this?' It wasn't getting enough trucks to cover outbound freight in its area, so it started moving trucks from some areas that were overstaffed. Since then, its numbers have shot up."

There's a second set of "customers" at Roberts Express - the drivers. Throughout the trucking industry, the relationship between dispatcher and driver is tricky, to say the least. "A monster" is how Scott McCahan, manager of contractor relations for Roberts, describes it. That's why Roberts encourages its dispatchers to go on "ride-alongs" with truckers, to get a sense of life on the road and a better understanding of what it's like on the other end of the C-Link. For example, many drivers are away from home for weeks at a time. They sleep in the truck cab, eat and shower at truck stops, and hope for long runs that'll make the payments on a $100,000 rig. From the drivers' point of view, the dispatchers control how much money they make. Roberts pays its contractors 58% of the shipping cost. The drivers pay for their own fuel.

"You have to know the drivers' personalities to know how to deal with them," says Brenda Arthur, a dispatcher who came to Roberts in 1983. "There's one couple, a husband and wife team, who was near-impossible. They took everything personally. Later I learned they were having money problems and that they had a grandchild with leukemia. The next time I talked to the wife, I asked for the grandchild's name. She was taken aback. I told her I wanted to pray for him in the Sunday school teen group I lead. Well, that broke the ice. After that, she warmed up to me."

It's certainly important for Roberts to keep its drivers happy. But nothing takes precedence over satisfying its customers. And those customers are very satisfied, thank you: Roberts knows this because it measures customer satisfaction. Every month, the company pays National Market Measures in Westlake, Ohio to survey 150 of the most recent customers and ask them about service. On a scale from minus-2 to plus-2, the customer-satisfaction level almost always measures around 1.9. Ten years ago, when the company's initial scores came back at around 1.8, Mark Traylor, director of quantitative services for the research firm, warned Roberts that the number would drop. It's the law of averages, he said. Instead, it went up.

"Satisfaction is so high that there is almost nothing Roberts can do that will raise it any higher," says Traylor. "Roberts has defied the laws of probability. I know technology is behind it, but that's just a symptom of its philosophy. It focuses on the customer."

At the end of each of its reports, National Market Measures attaches a run-down of some of the comments from customers. Here are a few of them:

"I called late morning, telling them this shipment had to go out. They got there before noon to pick it up. When I came into work the next morning, there was a message on my voice mail saying the delivery had been made."

"When I call Roberts and give them my name and company, they know everything about me."

"Roberts can make the right-size truck available to me 99 percent of the time. I was told by the customer to use them in an emergency situation. They never let us down."

The one thing that customers don't mention, says Greulich, is Roberts's technology. "Customers don't say, 'Hey, we use you because of your fancy computers and your satellites.' They say, 'It's because you get there on time.' "

Chuck Salter (csalter@bcpl.net), a writer based in Baltimore, contributes regularly to Fast Company.