Finding Solutions Through Service

In an article written by Entrepreneur titled “Forget Your Product: Start Selling ‘Solutions’ Instead”, it is explained that the most successful businesses, whether they provide products or services, always provide solutions for customers and clients.

 

Businesses that operate strictly with products are capable of being successful; however, these products are often one-size-fits-all solutions that only provide a temporary fix to the needs or wants of customers. To solve problems for the long term, or even permanently, it is necessary that businesses like us create genuine connections with other people rather than push products towards them.

 

For CITY, our quality service catered uniquely to each client’s needs is what leads to the solutions our clients value.

 

When it comes to rental items, direct purchases, and inventory management, there are simply more important things your management can be focusing on. To solve that problem and help your management spend more time on productive work, CITY takes care of all inventory management to keeps your business clean, safe, and efficient.  Our clients can rely on our clean and simple process to keep their business looking great while providing the items they need to stay productive.

 

CLIENT COMMITMENT

CITY is constantly striving to stay up to date with industry best practice and provide unique solutions for each and every one of our clients. This mission is supported by our CITY Quality Management (CQM) system, a continuous improvement system based on industry best practice and input from our clients regarding their service.

 

“For [the system] to be effective, the whole company has to take ownership in it,” said President of CITY, Colin Wetlaufer. “When we really wanted to push the envelope, we looked into the processing of laundry in the healthcare industry and what they’re doing. That’s who we look at as a peer in the quality management world.”

 

The CQM system doubles as both an improvement management system and, when paired with our ultra-high frequency (UHF) tracking chips, as a means for us to manage uniform and product inventory throughout our facility. The UHF chips ensure that all of our garments and mats passing through our facility are accounted for, properly serviced, and returned promptly to our clients.

 

In addition, UHF chips assist CITY in our quality management program for each individual garment, because we have the capability to track and record the number of washes, repairs, and number of times a uniform has been serviced. Because of our extensive experience in the industry, we know exactly how many times a product can be serviced before it needs to be upgraded and replaced, and we are more than happy to do that to meet our clients’ uniform needs.

 

In total, the CQM system encompasses a thorough 5-point inspection of all garments that pass through our facility, guaranteeing our clients’ products are promptly repaired and replaced when necessary.

 

FLEXIBLE SERVICE

Because we know each of our clients will have different needs that change over the course of our partnership, CITY emphasizes a flexible service approach to meet those needs.

 

We understand that one-size-fits-all solutions don’t get the job done, so we are prepared to make internal adjustments in order to get uniforms or other items to our clients when they need them so they can meet their own production demands. In addition, our inventory management has flexibility built in to allow your new hires to get into a uniform within their first week on the job. We know what our clients go through to remain flexible to meet the needs of their customers, and we aim to do the same for them.

 

To further ensure our promise of unique solutions for each client, CITY has created a number of inventory and billing strategies to facilitate all of our clients across the food processing, industrial manufacturing, and wholesale industries.

 

For our clients in the industrial manufacturing and wholesale industries, CITY provides the CITY Asset Management (CAM) system. CAM is an all-inclusive billing program and pricing methodology that eliminates the typical issues of billing in the uniform industry.

 

Studies and polls have shown that clients of the uniform industry most commonly have frustrations with shortages, garment repairs not being done, and a lack of fair and accurate billing. To solve these problems, CITY created CAM. CAM provides solutions to these issues by eliminating fees and charges regarding repairs, damages, or even replacement of lost uniforms. CAM is billed as a fixed rate calculated based on our clients’ operational needs, the quantity of items in service, and their behavior and usage of those items. This strategy eliminates any cause of conflict in the first place, and ensures that our clients don’t have to waste time figuring out what went wrong so they can focus on growing their business.

 

For our clients in the food processing industry, CITY uses a billing approach based on usage. Our competitors in the uniform industry typically charge clients a percentage of total inventory, even if they don’t use most of the uniforms available to them in a week. At CITY, we only bill our clients for the uniforms that are actually being used and serviced at our facility; this approach has saved some of our clients up to 30 percent compared to percentage based inventory charges.

 

Alongside our usage vs. inventory approach, CITY provides an emergency inventory to help our clients remain flexible. Of course, clients only pay for these uniforms when they are actually used, and this system ensures new hires can get to work on the first day, and it helps our clients meet ever changing production demands in a given week.

 

Lastly, CITY further highlights our commitment to providing clients in the food industry with a clean, sterile product through our recently acquired Hygienically Clean Food Safety certification through the Textile Rental Services Association (TRSA).

 

 

END PRODUCT: SOLUTIONS

All in all, CITY’s various strategies, programs, and management systems were created with one purpose in mind: to provide a clean and simple service that delivers genuine solutions to our clients’ problems.

 

At CITY, we don’t believe we are selling products; we believe we are selling a service.

 

THE CITY APPROACH

At CITY, building trust with our clients and proving our commitment to a quality service above all else is the first step in onboarding new clients, and we do that through our numerous service programs including CQM,UHF chip tracking, CAM and more.

 

CITY is devoted to providing unique, long-term solutions for our clients, and we strive for that goal by first developing real, genuine relationships with our clients. Once we know what our clients’ needs are, we bring value to our clients by providing a quality, responsive service alongside solutions created to meet their personal needs, which gives them the ability to focus on what’s most important: growing their business.