SPOTLIGHT ON EXCELLENCE

Claremont Facility.

Focus on Customers

Delivering excellent customer service is Matlock’s fundamental best practice. That’s every good recycler’s goal, and the Matlock’s team has come up with some innovative methods to accomplish it.

“They now are permanently closed. The two yards we have are within 35 minutes of each other – easily manageable.”

The Cleveland and Claremont locations combined encompass about 80 acres and 240,000 square feet of warehousing. Between the

Cleveland Facility.

two locations in western North Carolina, Matlock’s serves collision repair shops and other business cus- tomers within a 75-mile radius, including north into Virginia and south into South Carolina.

A Lesson in Trust

At the same time Matlock was dealing with the stress of three locations and renovation of the Valentine box facility, he experienced an unexpected challenge. “We had embezzlement at one of our locations,” he says. “That slowed us down considerable, even though we had cash reserves.”

Although the employee responsible for the theft was caught and is being prosecuted, the crime had long- lasting effects on the business. “We had to rebuild inventory because we could not buy as much the first two years after the embezzlement,” explains Matlock’s HR Manager Amanda Matlock. “Thankfully we had money saved to help us survive and a loyal staff who stuck by us.”

As stressful and upsetting as the embezzlement was, the incident did have two positive outcomes. It showed a gap in Matlock’s policies and procedures which in the aftermath led to the development of new processes to ensure the problem will not happen again. And secondly, although it delayed opening the Claremont location, the violation of trust that the embezzlement represented strengthened everyone’s motivation to follow through on the plan.

54 Automotive Recycling | May-June 2015

Rigorous quality control is the starting point for their commitment to getting quality parts to customers. Matlock personally reviews photos of parts, looking for imperfections or incomplete cleaning before a part leaves the yard and rejects any part that falls short. Quality control throughout the sales cycle helps ensure total customer satisfaction. Matlock records all sales calls and listens to them to review the sales staff’s performance. “The recordings show us opportunities where we can help our people do even better,” he explains. “It’s also useful to get to the bottom of a situ- ation to prevent the same thing from happening again.” He often reminds the sales team that constant training is as much a part of their job as it is a professional foot- ball player’s. Through the appropriate use of call record- ing and feedback to the sales staff, all of the reps have taken their technique to the next level, he adds. Finally, to ensure that customer orders are moving through the system efficiently, Matlock’s uses Check- mate Order Trakker. A popular, user-friendly software program, it tracks work orders as parts move through the business, from sale to delivery. In today’s business environment where competition is intense and cus- tomer expectations for quality and service are high, Matlock considers an order tracking program essential to not only customer satisfaction but also a healthy bot- tom line.

Set Employee Goals

Jeff and Amanda agree that the company’s approx- imately 40 employees are one of their secrets to suc- cess. “We have an exceptional team of employees who work hard, support each other and stay focused on get- ting the job done,” Jeff notes. Between the two yards, the team dismantles approximately 2,500 vehicles a year, more than 50 in an average week. Keeping employees on track and motivated is criti- cal for maintaining that volume and profitability.