Skip to content

Creston's Overwaitea Foods awarded for excellent customer service

Overwaitea Food Group president presents Creston staff with company's first-ever Customer Service Excellence Award...
57906crestonoverwaitea
(Above) Stacy Sulko (left) and Overwaitea Foods manager Ron World with their customer service awards. (Below story

Smiles abounded among Creston Overwaitea Foods staff on March 10 when manager Ron World accepted a trophy that reflects his staff’s commitment to customer service.

“This really is an award that our employees have earned,” he said, holding a trophy that has only Creston’s name on it. “To be recognized by Overwaitea Food Group and given this brand new award is a reflection on our staff’s commitment to customer service.”

World and his team were presented with the award by Overwaitea Food Group president Darrel Jones and several other corporate executives, who flew in from Vancouver for the event.

World accepted the trophy from Cranbrook-born Jones, who explained the reason for the award’s creation.

“For the Overwaitea Food Group to win the west, we all have to be aligned to a 100 per cent focus on total customer satisfaction,” he said. “Almost four years ago we established our mission statement as ‘Always customer first,’ and last year we created a team member and customer campaign around ‘going the extra mile’.

“Each year at our Leadership Excellence Awards dinner, held at our annual senior leaders’ conference, we recognize leaders in our company who have made a significant contribution to their organization.

“As we looked at our lineup of awards, we felt that we needed a big award around customer service recognizing the store team that realized a significant positive shift in customer service metrics.”

Jones said all stores are measured in three ways — customer service score, greet score and net mile score.

“For this Customer Service Excellence Award, we analyzed these three measurements, and weighted them all equally. Customer service is our biggest point of differentiation. Giving customers what they want, when they want it and how they wanted it is something we’ve all become passionate about.

“But there is one store that in 2015 did an amazing job with service. The combination of their 2015 scores and the improvement scores ranked Ron World and his team from Overwaitea 16 in Creston as the top performing service store.

“Congratulations to Ron and his team for being the recipients of OFG’s first Customer Service Excellence award!”

At the same event, Overwaitea’s Stacy Sulko was awarded a $2,500 travel voucher, after being nominated by other employees who felt he went above and beyond the call of duty in customer service.