Company: LXE Inc., Norcross, Georgia
Company Description: LXE Inc. develops rugged mobile handheld and vehicle-mounted computers, advanced auto-ID technologies, and wireless networking products that improve performance of supply chain execution applications. LXE also offers a full range of turnkey services including wireless network design and installation.
Nomination Category: Organization Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Customer Service Organization

Nomination Title: LXE Inc.'s Award-Winning Customer Service Organization

1. Tell the story about what this nominated organization/department achieved in the past year (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

LXE Inc. develops industrial wireless computing solutions that improve supply
chain performance. LXE also offers a full range of turnkey services including
project coordination and wireless network design and installation. 

The soul of LXE is its service & support organization. Our US customer
service organization is based in Norcross, Georgia with field service
engineers located nationwide. Support calls are answered in Norcross by a live
person (no IVR) where they are immediately addressed. If the issue can’t be
resolved over the phone a field service engineer is dispatched to the customer
location. This may sound like a standard structure for a customer service
organization, but it’s far from it. The difference, and what sets us apart
from the others, is that our service organization is not a profit center. We
use our service organization to sell our hardware. This type of structure
gives us much greater flexibility to service our customers in ways others
can’t. Below are two of many examples of LXE going above and beyond for our
customers:

Example 1: A large trucking company installed LXE’s mobile computers along
with a non-LXE mobile computer management software package. The trucking
company realized quickly that they didn’t have the expertise in house to
effectively install and run the management application. The software company
was unable to appropriately assist so they came to us. We sent a field
service engineer that had experience with the specific application on site. 
He spent over a week onsite for no charge installing, configuring and testing
the management software. If our service organization was a profit center,
this would have never been possible. The customer was delighted.

Example 2: A food distributor purchased computers from LXE to run on a
wireless backbone installed by someone else. When the computers went live the
system didn’t operate as expected. The customer assumed the problem was with
LXE. We, knowing that it was a network problem, sent a field service engineer
to the site. The problem was, as expected, with the network. Even though we
were not the problem’s source, we fixed it for the customer free of charge. 
Fixing customer's faulty network installations is standard fair for LXE. 
Again, we would not be able to do this if our customer service organization
were a profit center. 

The above represents a small sampling of examples of LXE’s service
organization going above and beyond. Our now legendary service and support
efforts haven’t gone unnoticed by our customers. We recently finished our
sixth year of record year over year revenues. And we’ve won our fifth
consecutive Mobile Star award for best customer service – awarded by a leading
online mobile computing newsletter. 

A key to a successful service program is a comprehensive set of service
oriented management metrics. We track, manage, and “pay bonuses” to our
service and support organization based on a broad range of metrics ranging
from on time delivery to out of box acceptance to repair turn around time to
overall customer satisfaction.

2. List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

http://www.ems-t.com/PressRelease/PressRelease.aspx?id=650

3. Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated organization/department:

Jim Childress, LXE's president and GM, joined LXE in 2000. Upon arriving, Jim
quickly realized the value of LXE's outstanding reputation for service and
support. To extend LXE's support leadership position, Jim orchestrated the
development and fielding of LXE's industry-leading service
offering, "ServicePass". He also successfully guided LXE through ISO
9001:2000 registration to insure that the proper processes, procedures, and
metrics were in place to insure continuous improvements in customer
satisfaction. He is often heard saying to employees and customers, “At LXE
service doesn’t end after installation, it’s just the beginning.”