Paul Duncan, Norfolk Southern’s Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and Joe Gioe, Vice President, Transportation, discuss how process and rigor are key to delivering excellent customer service.

Here’s what they had to say:

Paul Duncan

One component of our strategy is to safely deliver reliable and resilient service and in order to maintain that level of consistency and rigor, we need to build process into everything that we do in Operations.

Joe Gioe

Our process rigor is the baseline of our future. We know that we need consistency to meet our customer’s expectations day in and day out. And with Performance Excellence, what we’re endeavoring across the entire organization, is to set in motion that foundation.

Some of those things look like clear roles and responsibilities, by role, by department. Then we have very clear standard operating procedures for our terminals that have been built. And then lastly, making sure that there’s a clear understanding of how all those things interconnect with each other across all critical departments that achieve the outcome.

Paul Duncan

We’re embedding a culture of process rigor into everything that we do in Operations, beyond what we traditionally have done. Again, this is aligned with safely delivering reliable and resilient service. We need to be able to execute consistently and safely for our customers day in, and day out.

Joe Gioe

In our industry, it’s the consistency of our service that allows us to grow. It’s what gives our customers the confidence that we can take on new freight and make it from Point A to Point B consistently. Process gets us back to the consistent service sooner and with a better-quality product every day.