Customer Service Drives
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By Eileen Henry Todd Truitt wanted an eye-catching name for his courier company, something to represent quickness and efficiency. "I happened to run across a graphic of a firecracker exploding and decided TNT would be a good name because it's fast and explosive," said Truitt, owner of TNT Delivery Services. TNT handles 30 to 75 deliveries per day. With a staff of three, 90 percent of the deliveries are made by the same person who picked them up. This is one way, Truitt said, they make customer service their priority. "What a lot of courier companies do is they're always ready to say yes, we can do it no matter what, but they can't always do what they say," "I'll never say yes to something I know can't be done; I'll always tell them what we can do. Nine out of 10 times that's what they want to hear." Before starting his company in 1996, Truitt worked for a courier company, where he started as a driver and worked his way up to running the office. "I noticed things that mortgage companies needed that they weren't getting," Truitt said. "The company wasn't interested in giving them the service they needed, so I left the company and started my own." Mortgage and title companies, TNT's primary clientele, need reliability and fast service, he said. TNT has a driver who starts his shift at 1 p.m. to cover after-hours deliveries. Brian Showers, a loan officer for Great Southwest Mortgage who sometimes works out of his home, uses TNT for four to five deliveries per week. "One of the things that I like about them is that they do run into the evening hours," Showers said. "I don't work 8 to 5, sometimes I work until 9 or 10 in the evening. . . . (The paperwork) will be on the desk of the person I'm sending it to at 8 a.m. |
"That's above and beyond the call in the courier business." What mortgage companies need from delivery services, Showers said, is reliability and confidentiality. "In the mortgage business, we do a lot of document-running back and forth from either processing officers to title companies (or) to and from clients' homes. "It's also important in our business for (courier service) not only to be personable, but reliable and confidential. (There) are a lot of documents running around with people's personal information."
TNT offers notarization and a service in
which documents are verified for signatures or initials. "It's difficult to persuade people, especially when what you're trying to offer is not less expensive service, but better service." "We're trying to show our clients that we want to get to know people, we want to have a personal relationship with them, we want to them to feel they can completely rely on us." Darlene Greenberg, receptionist for Great Southwest Mortgage in Scottsdale, said all 11 of the firm's branches use TNT Delivery. |
"The big couriers, you have to baby-sit them because they're huge," Greenberg said. For example, "when I needed something delivered by 9 a.m. and it's still here at 11 a.m. "When I call Todd, he's here or one of his employees is here, so I never have to worry." TNT delivers documents such as blueprints for the mortgage company to and from branches and businesses. "He has two people working for him and there is never, 'I can't do it,' " Greenberg said. "He charges a bit more than the other couriers, but with the other couriers, you have kids coming in here smelling of cigarettes and with body piercing; some of them are illiterate. Whenever we give our new branches Todd's card, they're very happy with him." TNT estimates that they log anywhere from 150 to 200 miles per day to make the 15 to 25 deliveries on the averages. Truitt said the biggest challenge of his business is traffic. "It's the only part of the business that you can't control," he said. Although TNT's customers are predominantly in north Phoenix and Scottsdale, Truitt would like to expand to Tucson and Flagstaff, either merging with other courier companies or buying them out. "I would like to be the courier company for the title and mortgage industry within the state of Arizona," Truitt said. "When somebody in mortgage and title wants to move something, I'd like TNT Delivery to be the name that comes to the front of their mind." |
