As winner of The Excellence in Service Award in The Excellence in Housewares Awards 2020, Dexam’s Bryony Dyer talked to HousewaresNews.net about the impact of the pandemic on the company’s approach to service:
“Our philosophy throughout has been to try to see the pandemic through the eyes of our customers, as well as our own. This has made us push reliability, communication and, above all, flexibility to the very top of our working lives. It has also refreshed, as if it needed it, our determination to let the human beings in our organisation come to the fore, to be a voice at the end of the phone rather than an automated response from a distant computer.
“Finally, it has made us try even harder to make ourselves easy to deal with; things like buying in singles (small shops don’t want big outers), having a low free carriage level, and being happy to add things to orders until the last minute are, we think, the sort of things that our customers want. Like everyone, we will always make the occasional mistake, but when life is tough enough for everyone, we make sure that we sort them even quicker than normal, so as to remove stress from our customers. “
Reflecting on the ways in which lockdown has affected the Dexam team, Bryony said: “As far as our own business is concerned, we learned in the first lockdown that most of our work could be done from our homes, and that it was only when stock movements were concerned that we needed team members in. So it has been a case of trying to make the communication as good as it can be, being more disciplined about emails, and having a social WhatsApp group for the staff to share pictures, thoughts and celebrations on. Competitive baking and landscape shots became a thing for us in the first lockdown, and maybe it will in this one, too. At the risk of sounding sentimental, the pandemic reminds us day after day that there is much more to work than what it says on the job description.”
When asked about the year ahead, Bryony commented: “Are we optimistic for 2021? It’s very hard to be, and we have seen from the Prime Minister the problems that arise when people say things are rosier than they are, but we are cautiously positive. We really do believe that the housewares industry is exceptionally well placed to be one of the beneficiaries, as people rediscover the simple joys of food preparation again, and get steadily better at it. Like all our colleagues out there, we know that some things will have changed for ever but that, when this is over, we will be the same social creatures as we ever were, and will crave the same things.”
Top: Dexam’s Bryony Dyer with Dexam’s Excellence in Housewares Awards trophy (for Excellence in Innovation) from the 2019 awards.
