For Goodall Pools, recent efforts to maintain and even improve customer service have largely focused on the company’s responsiveness to customers.
Part of this has been addressed in changes to staffing. Goodall decided to remove the division between new construction, renovation and service departments. Now, these crews all work as one, so they can respond to the current need. Now, if demand is heavy on the new construction side, that area can be served more, without departments being ruled out because it’s not their specialty.
“Instead of having two or three crews in renovations, we now have seven or eight crews doing everything,” says Robert Goodall, vice president of the Camp Hill, Pa.-based company. “It spreads the work out a lot more evenly and allows us to get to our customers more efficiently.”
Additionally, the company recently created a project manager position to work under the construction manager. This person is better positioned than the construction manager to visit sites more often and provide more customer attention.
“That’s actually played a pretty big role in customer satisfaction,” Goodall says. “Just even the response of hearing from a project manager about what’s going on for the day, or how they’re coming out to help with an issue that’s at hand ... just having that person there to be able to do that goes a pretty long way.”
To help manage the historic lead flow of the last couple years, Goodall Pools also has adopted technological ways to streamline communication and service. When it became clear that the company could not sustain its longstanding policy of returning all calls within 24 hours, it developed a “digital sales packet,” which provided plenty of preliminary information to get customers started before they could have a proper conversation. A cover letter for the package would explain the backlogs and why it would take some time for a sales meeting.
“And it said, ‘In the meantime here’s a lot of really good information. Review it, jot down some questions, check out our website,’” says Dan Inderbitzen, the company’s vice president of pools and renovations. “People really appreciated that ... because we were responding to them in a really direct and rapid manner.”
A new customer relationship management program has helped the company keep up with customer needs as well, Goodall says.
