Member Spotlight: April Klein

For April Klein, vice president of customer support services at Lippert Components, Inc., working in the world of RVs for more than two decades has been a natural outgrowth of her childhood. She was raised in Junction City, Ore., the site of two diesel RV manufacturers; her mother worked at one of them, running a division in their production facility. “That's really how I got into it. It was a big part of the community where I grew up,” said Klein.

Lippert Components, Inc. is the leading supplier of components to the RV and residential housing industries, as well as adjacent industries including bus, cargo, equestrian trailer, marine and heavy truck. With over 65 facilities located throughout the United States, Canada, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom, the company employs more than 9,000.

Klein came to Lippert in 2012 after more than two decades as a customer service executive at Monaco Coach Corporation. At Monaco, she had extensive experience in managing large scale operations, including multiple-site parts distribution centers, customer service call centers, warranty operations, technical publications, dealer training, factory service operations and recall administration. All of which made her a natural fit at Lippert.

Moving into the mostly male RV manufacturing world never fazed Klein - she says she never thought much about it. “It was just a way of life and if you don't make that a factor, there are fewer barriers there. Equality is important, but I usually forget that I'm the only woman in the group.”

Klein has never been intimidated by real or imagined barriers. In fact, she has always celebrated her part in moving the company forward, most recently, relocating to Indiana, and helping Lippert grow and change the way they approached parts and service.

“In 2013 we were housed in a two-story, 25,000 square foot building in Goshen that accommodated our parts warehouse, call center, warranty team and five service bays. In 2014 we moved everyone, except the warranty team and service technicians,” said Klein. This move allowed the company to enter a 539,000 square foot building in South Bend where they occupied nearly 250,000 square feet for parts distribution and another 25,000 square feet was dedicated to the call center, technical publications, aftermarket sales and dealer training team.

“At the time nobody imagined we would outgrow that space, but we were quickly competing for space with our OEM furniture division,” said Klein. “We needed more warehouse space, more office space, and dedicated space for our Technical Training team to host events for dealers and OEM’s.”

By 2018, the team moved into a 450,000 square foot facility across town to house its parts distribution, Technical Institute, aftermarket sales team and some OEM customer service team members.

Lippert’s aftermarket customer service structure allows customers to have one consolidated source for anything related to customer service, warranty or parts ordering for any product produced by any of our US plants. The new Technical Institute is dedicated to technical training and technical publications. “Our team has done an incredible job making a state-of-the-art training center with multiple classrooms and product labs with training aids, full-size components, and hands-on tools, mock-ups, and product displays of all of our functional components.”

Because the Lippert company presence encompasses 65 facilities located around the world, with over 9,000 employees, Klein says that they work hard to ensure that the various operations and the multiple tasks, including acquisitions, have cohesion.

“We don't always integrate acquisitions in immediately, but we do it from a service perspective where it makes sense,” says Klein. “So, there are certain acquisitions that we will make a conscious decision to go ahead and roll them into the rest of our customer service group. In other cases where it's a standalone, or maybe not relevant to integrate into the customer service, then we may not do that.”

According to Klein, coordination in the area of new acquisitions is very important. She says there is no “magical” way of making decisions, but “it has to make sense.” She elaborates that the team consistently asks themselves: “does it makes sense from a business perspective; does it improve our business; does it fit into the rest of our product line? We want to be diversified, but also opportunistic."

One of her many interactions with the broader RV industry is expressed in her role as a board member of the RV Technical Institute. Klein sees the Institute as an excellent way to build more structure around the training of technicians. “Lippert's view on training and servicing the industry is that it’s something that we as a community have a duty to make sure that we're protecting the outcomes for our customers. It's nice to see everybody coming together between the RV Industry Association, the RV Dealer Association, various suppliers and OEMs to work to get more technicians into the industry and trained.”

Lippert has been a longstanding member of the RV Industry Association. Several years ago, the Association brought in the aftermarket group to the organization. Klein believes that consolidation speaks to the importance of getting people to agree and share common goals.

“I think it has been really positive. The more consistency that we get through consolidation is helpful to everybody, even though not everybody always agrees on how to get there,” says Klein. “Then everybody puts their different opinions aside and focuses on what the endgame is - which is continuing to grow the RV industry and do what's right for the consumer.”

She stresses that doing what’s best for consumers often starts with a company’s core values, and how a company continually reinforces those values. “We're extremely focused on employee engagement. When we first developed our core values, it gave us specific actions to carry out with teammates,” said Klein. “So, if some employees are not living up to those core values, it gave all of our team permission and empowerment to call each other out. That way, you get everybody on track.”

Klein draws a straight line from an employee’s feeling of belonging to a family at work, to an ability to carry that good feeling to customers. “They say your customer is only as happy as your employees, and that is so true,” says Klein. “A person’s mood at work is going to translate into how they treat customers. So, we believe if we take care of our people, they're going to take care of our customers, and our business is going to take care of itself.”

People’s most precious memories can be made in an RV and as an industry it’s important we all stay focused on the true impact we can have on people’s lives by providing a good experience.