DRIVEN BY CUSTOMERS
Tiffin does not distribute directly to the consumer, but through a high-quality network of roughly 100 dealers.
“We have the best motorized dealers in North America. I would put our dealer body up against anyone’s,” Leigh acclaims.
Best-in-class customer service nevertheless remains a huge strategic imperative, and no other motorhome company can compare with Tiffin’s ongoing owner support.
Customer service has always been a part of how Tiffin has built the brand and the company, an ethos that has permeated the entire organization and driven quality standards over the years.
“It’s one of the reasons why Tiffin has a reputation for building a first-class quality product. We focus on customer service and quality every single day,” affirms Leigh.
“The primary core value that we communicate to new Tiffin team members on day one of employment is being customer-driven. The customer is always right and drives our business; their desires and needs are what we work our way backward from to create the experience that they expect.”
What Tiffin has always tried to do is to take care of its motorhome owners, through its service departments in Red Bay (Class A) and Winfield (Class C).
Less than a five-minute drive from Tiffin’s production plant, the Class A Tiffin Service and Parts Center in Red Bay is one of many locations that are qualified to service the company’s motorhomes.
The facility has 53 bays manned by knowledgeable technicians, able to assist owners in almost all of their service needs on a first come, first served basis.
“The big thing that we do is help our owners because it’s hard to manage an RV, so we try to make it as easy as possible,” Bob assures.
“We can explain how things work and we have all the parts here, so if they’ve got a problem, we can make their motorhome 100 percent functional if they come by here. That’s one of the reasons why we have so many owners coming to the plant here for our service.”
Tiffin is also going to take the next step and introduce new technology into the company’s customer service processes, so that customers have a real e-commerce experience for parts and support.
“We’re looking to constantly evolve and advance so that we can modernize, be easy to do business with, and make things as seamless as possible for our dealers and customers,” Leigh outlines.
“We have some really exciting plans in the works to continue to upgrade and elevate the Tiffin customer experience. I think that there are a lot of opportunities for us to modernize the way we do business with our dealers and customers over the next 18 to 24 months.
“As well as upgrading facilities and technologies with respect to the customer experience, the primary investments that we’re interested in right now as a company are also centered around what we can do to improve the employee experience,” he adds.
TURNING PARTS INTO PRODUCTS
Assembly is the core business of Tiffin, whose quality products truly begin with the components that it sources from suppliers and partners.
“It’s really our suppliers and partners that deliver what we need to be an assembler,” Leigh recognizes.
“When you look at Tiffin, and what makes us unique and first-rate in terms of quality, it’s the fact that we have very high standards for the suppliers that we partner with, and the components that we use for our products.”
Suppliers are clearly an integral part of Tiffin’s operations and success, as the company’s highly skilled and fully trained RV assemblers take these parts and turn them into something special for the end user.
Nobody appreciates the value of a skilled, experienced team member more than Leigh, having started up Vanleigh RV and learning first-hand the value of a skilled workforce.
“It’s such a tremendous asset to know that we have trained RV builders at Tiffin that are so skilled in their own ways,” Leigh admires.
“We take these great components that we source from our supply chain and put them all together in a way that performs and delivers on the Tiffin brand promise.”
The last couple of years have admittedly been challenging from a supply chain perspective for Tiffin, prominently due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, having now been in business for half a century, it is just one of a number of trials and tribulations that the company has emerged from unscathed.
“Looking back, we’ve dealt with almost every kind of problem that could possibly happen to the RV industry,” Bob reflects.
“We’ve had the energy crisis, gasoline shortages, high interest rates, government administrations that haven’t done too well – we’ve had all kinds of issues. No one knows what the future holds; the only thing we have is where we’ve been.”
SUSTAINABILITY PUSH
What the future certainly does hold is a commitment to sustainability, a hot topic for people, businesses and governments the world over in response to climate change.
Central to RVing traditions are the country’s iconic landscapes, which must be protected for the enjoyment of future generations.
The RV industry has, for example, partnered with local, state, and federal agencies on projects and policies that support public lands and promote responsible visitor practices in the US, and set ambitious sustainability goals.
For Tiffin, sustainability is something that the company is always pushing to improve upon.
“Last year, we retrofitted all of our manufacturing facilities, that’s over one million square feet, with highly efficient LED lighting,” Leigh reveals.
“We’ve also introduced landfill reduction strategies, and we’ve seen an improvement in our landfill waste by about 25 percent in the last three years. We are always looking to be a great corporate steward and improve the efficiency of our operations for all our stakeholders.”
Equally, Tiffin will embark on a raft of other key annual initiatives over the next 12 months, themed around the preservation, evolution, and growth of the company.
“From my very first day at Tiffin, about a year and a half ago, I said the theme that we’re going to pursue is to preserve, evolve, and grow,” outlines Leigh.
“Preserve the core fabric of the company, what we’re known for, the Bob Tiffin legacy and our customer-driven mindset; evolve in a way that says Tiffin is the industry leader in terms of service, quality, and ease of doing business with; and then grow, because everyone wants to be part of something that’s growing, and our dealer partners want to see the value of the Tiffin franchise enhanced by additional product offerings and new categories that we may not have participated in previously.”
One of Tiffin’s big initiatives is to define a three-year product roadmap, and to continue diversifying its impressive portfolio of RVs.
Indeed, despite being an industry leader in quality and service for both Class A and Class C motorhomes, there is a big emphasis on new offerings.
“There are exciting opportunities for new offerings in our three-year product roadmap, even in the Class A category,” Leigh shares.
“This year, we also want to become the industry leader in terms of paint quality. We’re already very near the top, but we think that we can continue to improve because paint is such a huge aesthetic feature for our customers; we have a state of the art paint facility, so we really want to take that to the next level.”
Another huge initiative for Tiffin over the next 18 to 24 months is to achieve a 90 percent 48-hour fulfilment rate on dealer parts orders, and to be 100 percent on-time for local manufacturing and servicing.
The company will also continue to improve its customer experience model and figure out how to redefine the Tiffin Allegro Club so that it can be more inclusive and encompassing of all product categories.
“Last but not least, we’re going to take our enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and really support our sales, parts, and service operations in a way that we never have before,” Leigh concludes.
TIFFIN MOTORHOMES PARTNERS
