Feldco Focuses on Customer Service to Maintain Small Company Feel: ERP system alone is not enough to ensure customer delight
October 1, 2009, from Window & Door
(Des Plaines, IL)- Feldco has figured out that the best cure for
growing pains-and panes-is sometimes the simplest pill. As the
Chicago-based replacement company has gotten bigger, adding more
locations to serve more geographic areas, it has pushed harder and
harder to continue to delight its customers.
Maintaining customer satisfaction through significant growth can be
made easier with investments in software to track each part of the
process, but it all boils down the employees, and how committed
they are to making sure each and every customer is satisfied.
"It's vitally important that we never lose sight of who keeps the
lights on, and that's the consumers," says Doug Cook, Feldco
president. "They're also the single best lead source we have, and
that's word-of-mouth."
It may seem trite to say that Feldco is surviving the economic
storm by focusing on customer service, but that's really what the
company is doing. In the last few years, as the company has
expanded well beyond its Chicago roots into new markets like
Indianapolis and Madison and Milwaukee, Wis., the management team
wanted to make sure that the customers were continuing to get a
small company feel from a getting-much-bigger company.
The management team explains that Feldco's year has been much like
that of other window and door companies. Although the downturn has
been challenging, Cook says the dealer is looking at the economic
time-out as an opportunity to improve the processes it has in place
to ensure customer satisfaction. "We expected lower sales so we
held our powder dry," he says. "We didn't expand the marketing, we
just focused on our core customers, working on our service and
implementing a new ERP."
In addition to improving its technological tools, Feldco has looked
for prudent opportunities to invest in employee training and new
talent-all with the aim to set itself up for future growth when the
market does turn. "Investment is a tricky word," Cook says. "I
think you have to make wise expenditures. You have to discern the
difference between needs and wants. The wants are the things you
need to put on the back burner, and you should put the needs in
front of you to figure out what you can get affordably. These
[economic] circumstances that make it difficult to sell into also
give an opportunity to retain terrific talent at a lower cost, for
example. We look at our opportunities and see where we can
benefit."
And for Feldco, the most important opportunities lie in the realm
of managing the customer experience. "Everything we do from the
very first point of contact, up to the final point where we make
sure they're delighted with the experience, we do everything to
make sure they're satisfied with their purchase from Feldco," Cook
says.
GROWTH MANAGEMENT
Bernie Feld founded Feldco more than 50 years ago to sell storm
windows to the Chicago area. When he retired several years ago, he
transitioned the company to Cook's leadership, who continued the
family-owned tradition that had grown into a thriving replacement
window company. Cook and his team have stretched Feldco beyond its
Chicago borders in the last few years to additional Midwest
markets. But staying true to its early roots is important to the
company; the additional locations and sales volume cannot come at
the hands of weaker customer service, the team contends.
The dealer wants each customer to still get that "small company"
feel despite the additional volume and sees technology as a way to
help consistently manage the important touch points. "In short, we
outgrew our old system," Cook explains. "When we looked at our
goals as an organization, we realized the system supporting our
operations would not be able to sustain us into the future. We
didn't have the horsepower in our IT infrastructure."
The way the company approached the enterprise resource planning
system was to make sure that no customers feel as though their
project has slipped through the cracks. "Our ERP starts with the
very first point of contact," says Michael Cox, director of
corporate development. "We can handle over the phone or internet
more information than we ever could before. We are able to follow
through with them on the entire Feldco experience. At any of our
locations, you can track exactly what's happening with that
customer at any point in time, period."
The technology helps Feldco make sure that what the staff is
pursuing internally in terms of creating a good customer experience
is actually resonating with customers. "Having that good data
allows us to follow up with customers after we think the job is
finished to make sure they think so too," Cox says. "If there are
any outstanding follow-up issues, they get handled immediately and
don't slip through the cracks.
"That's when customers become dissatisfied-when they think you've
forgotten about them," he adds.
THE BIG PICTURE
While the new, customized ERP helps manage details, the Feldco
leadership asserts that it's still only one leg of the three-legged
stool. Without a solid product offering and employees inspired to
pursue customer satisfaction, the ERP would not stand alone as a
successful solution. "We can have the best ERP in the world, but
really it's the people who deliver customer service into the home,"
Cox says.
Feldco has come up with a system to take customer satisfaction to
another level-what they call customer delight. "Most people talk in
terms of customer satisfaction," Cox says. "To satisfy customers,
that's one level of experience and expectations. We want to deliver
a delightful experience to customers."
To kick customer satisfaction up a notch, Feldco fosters employee
buy-in by building customer delight into all aspects of the
business. "We recalibrate our employees' expectations from what
might be a 'good enough' attitude, to going above and beyond," Cox
says. "In these tough economic times, we've looked internally to
find out what are the elements in our customer experience that we
can make better and how can we get our people to do that?"
To start, Feldco ties every employee's compensation, in part, to
customer satisfaction. The company has a comprehensive feedback
program that includes sending a survey to every customer to rate
the entire experience, Cox explains. "From the marketing they first
see to the final cleanup of the windows, we have to set the
expectations of employees that they need to deliver that same,
consistent experience throughout."
To make sure customer delight permeates the entire organization,
Feldco engages employees in off-season training. When seasonal
sales slows the company's pace in the winter, employees get at
least six hours of customer delight training that includes role
playing and new hires go through a comprehensive orientation.
"We're always training customer delight in all areas of the
company," he says.
Spending this much time and energy on creating and then measuring
customer satisfaction certainly helps keep its current customers
happy, but it also lends itself to the all-important customer
referral, Cook says. "Whenever we secure a customer, we do whatever
we can to retain and please and delight that customer," he
says.
LIP SERVICE PLUS
While many window and door companies aim to achieve high levels of
customer satisfaction, Feldco integrates the pursuit into almost
everything it does. This dedication has earned the company some
marketplace recognition, including a previous Window & Door
magazine Dealers of the Year award for Overall Excellence in
Serving Homeowners. Other accolades include an A+ grade from the
Better Business Bureau and an honorable mention as one of the best
places to work in Chicago by Crain's Magazine.
It seems to be resonating with customers as well. "I work for an
organization whose motto is 'everything we do revolves around the
customer,'" says homeowner Kelly Sather. "When I find an
organization with the same mindset, I patronize that organization
and even better, I recommend them when I can. This is something I
will do for Feldco without hesitation."
"From the time I contacted you via email, through the final
inspection of the bay and two casement windows we had installed,
your people were very courteous, friendly, professional and
timely," says Ernest Lindsey, another homeowner. "My wife and I are
very pleased with the whole operation and have already recommended
Feldco to a friend."
It's important to promote customer delight internally, but the
company ultimately works for external recognition in homeowners'
positive feedback. "When you get to referrals, that's the ultimate
measure of a satisfied customer," Cox says. "It definitely gets
into the market."
"In any industry, everybody wants to be sold," Cook contends.
"Nobody says that, but at the end of the day, they want to be given
a reason to buy. When someone dials our number, they're looking to
be sold. It's that initial impression-you want it to be favorable.
You don't always want to be selling overtly, but you want to leave
a good taste in their mouth. It can be as simple as setting an
appointment at a certain time and actually being there on
time."
The bottom-line reason Feldco is so customer satisfaction-crazy is
because, even though the company has pushed its limits for healthy
growth, each customer needs to have the company's value proposition
of good products, knowledgeable people and reasonable prices to
sign on the dotted line. "For our value promise to be true to a
customer, we need to be able to pass along the volume discounts
that we earn," Cook says. "The customer only really cares about
their home; they don't care that we sell a lot of windows. So how
do you make that volume benefit continues as a benefit and yet make
sure they don't get lost in the shuffle? It's with our system,
allowing us to run our organization like a small company with that
same high-touch, consistent feel."
