Weather history, degree-day history, delivery history, price history, equipment installation, and service history; all of this should be readily available to you either in your BOS or another source. The combination of this data is YOUR history. It tells the story of every customer interaction, delivery, payment, pricing program, service call, etc. This data is your most prized possession. Not only is it your customer list and your “official record” of customer behavior – but if utilized correctly, it provides insights into their future behavior. It doesn’t only tell you, it screams out to you!
In a typical year, a customer may have a half dozen deliveries, a couple of service calls, make monthly payments, and contact customer service a handful of times. That alone can be 20+ pieces of hard data. For a medium sized company, multiply that by ~8,000 customers, and you have over 150,000 data points. Multiply that by the 7 year average lifespan of a customer, and you might be sitting on more than 1,000,000 discrete data points. Like they say, the only thing worse than not enough data, is too much data.
However, what we have learned from the many millions of data points we have reviewed is that the seemingly unpredictable is actually very predictable:
• Delivery sizes are smaller in the winter than in the summer
• Days between deliveries for fall deliveries are far larger than for spring deliveries
• Average delivery size is never as big as the targeted “optimal” fill
• Monitored tanks get bigger deliveries
• Runouts are <1% of all scheduled deliveries, yet deliveries that are <35% of tank capacity are ~25% of all deliveries
• More stops per hour are made in the winter than in the summer, yet more pull-ahead delivers occur in the summer than in the winter
Our list of non-intuitive findings goes on and on, and no company is immune from the basic reality that historical delivery systems built to minimize inefficient deliveries, are archaically inefficient, leading to higher than necessary operational costs that can easily be lowered.
Have you analyzed your customers’ data in this critical manner? It’s all there in your BOS and ready to be leveraged. If you need help or need further guidance on how you can find this data, please reach out to us. We have done this for dozens of companies, we can help you establish your baseline and from there learn how to improve your all-important Bottom Line.