Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:04 Welcome to the clear impact podcast brought to you by P G T I university. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Sherry Connor and I am your host,
Speaker 2 00:00:20 The level of knowledge and understanding and the things that they do and have to complete day in and day out. Just like you were explaining about our dealers have a wealth of knowledge. These guys have an insane amount of knowledge and responsibilities that the team has as well to support the customer care team, the dealer and the business as a whole,
Speaker 1 00:00:38 You may call them wizards or geniuses, but we call them product specialists. This team is highly trained and extremely knowledgeable about our products in today's episode, Raymond Jones and Sherry Rowe share how this team is a vital key to customer success. So good morning, we are here on the clear impact podcast and we are continuing in our customer success podcast series. Today. We have backend studio, Raymond Jones, and with us for the first time is Sherry Rowe. So welcome.
Speaker 2 00:01:07 Thank you for having us. Yes.
Speaker 1 00:01:09 Thank you. So I'll let you guys introduce yourselves, share your title, the area of responsibility that you have, and maybe how long you've been doing this specific job that you're doing. All
Speaker 2 00:01:19 Right. I'll get us started. My name is Raymond Jones. I am the customer care training manager for the department. I am responsible for the product specialist group, which we'll be talking about today. I wear many hats, so I'm also responsible for processes, procedures, systems, things like that. So pretty busy, constantly. As far as my years of experience, I have been with the company for 10 years. Wow.
Speaker 1 00:01:42 Yeah. Congrats.
Speaker 2 00:01:43 Thank
Speaker 1 00:01:44 You. And how many people are on your team? Product
Speaker 2 00:01:46 Specialists? I believe I have a total of eight outside of the product specialist. I have another five team members.
Speaker 1 00:01:53 Okay. And you're responsible for training all of them so that they know what they're talking about.
Speaker 2 00:01:58 I'm responsible for assisting and keeping them in line. Sherry is more of the responsible one for the training of the product specialist. Okay. But I do work a lot with my training team to make sure that they are, you know, providing good assistance to the rest of the department.
Speaker 1 00:02:12 Okay. All right. And Sherry, thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 3 00:02:15 Thanks for having me. So
Speaker 1 00:02:16 Sherry's in the podcast studio at the same time. This is a first <laugh>. Yay. So tell us about you.
Speaker 3 00:02:21 All right. So I am Sherry Rowe. I am the senior product specialist. I'm responsible for leading the product specialist team and I've been with PGT for 23 years.
Speaker 1 00:02:33 Wow. That's amazing. So you know some stuff a little bit. Yeah. <laugh> all right. Well, I'm grateful for your time today. I know everyone's slammed. I know there's, you know, hundreds of emails waiting on you. So we won't, uh, we won't belabor this, but we did wanna just shed some light on what your team does and what your team does not do. And so how does the product specialist team support the customer care team, which then in turn supports our dealers? What is that process? What does all that look
Speaker 2 00:03:03 Like? So the product specialist team, as you mentioned, we support the customer care team, um, who supports our customers, which is our dealer base mm-hmm <affirmative>, who then supports the end user. So if the dealer in this case has a question concern about the product, any issues that are, you know, technical and the customer care representative is unable to answer that question or they need more clarity or whatever the case may be. They then reach out to the product specialist team to provide that assistance. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so that's pretty much the lineage of how that works.
Speaker 1 00:03:37 So when you say they reach out, you're not talking about the dealers reaching out to the product specialists, you're talking about the customer care team reaching out to the product specialists.
Speaker 2 00:03:47 Correct. So the customer care team will reach out to the product specialist group on the dealer's behalf. Okay. Just like any other department that we have within the company, you know, it's rare that a dealer, if I'm not mistaken, it's rare that a dealer will reach out to, uh, the physical logistics team or in marketing mm-hmm <affirmative> or any internal department within PG T mm-hmm <affirmative> they typically go through, they meaning the dealer will go through their customer care representative or their account manager to get their questions answered. Mm-hmm <affirmative> then depending on how that conversation goes or what the situation is, it'll be the responsibility of the customer care representative and the product specialist to make a decision on if a additional conversation needs to be had directly with set dealer mm-hmm
Speaker 1 00:04:33 <affirmative> okay. Well, that's good information. I mean, I guess that's probably very similar to like having lab work done. You don't talk to the lab, you talk to the doctor, right? So you have the doctor that relies on the person reading the radiology reports or the x-ray reports. I mean, sometimes the doctor will pull it up and explain it to you, but there's usually someone behind the scenes that's more specialized in those kinds of things. And so that's kind of the model that we have. Yes. Right. Is that that's
Speaker 2 00:04:58 A, a great way of explaining that.
Speaker 1 00:05:00 Mm-hmm <affirmative> okay. Awesome. And so obviously there's hundreds of emails and phone calls and things like that. Some of those happen before the order where someone's trying to just verify like, Hey, does this product come in this height? Does it come with that glass? Does it come with that handle? You know, can we make it a little smaller and will it raise the DP, whatever questions they have around that. And then some of the questions are afterwards, like, Hey, I just ordered this. It's been installed. It doesn't match or whatever. I don't know what those phone calls. You should be. The one telling me what those phone calls are. I don't have any idea. Maybe you can just kind of explain what the different topics are that this team addresses before
Speaker 3 00:05:36 The order, like you said, dealers will call and ask if we have certain options or if we can do something custom, you know, whatever the job may call for. And then we would determine whether or not it's manufacturable, whether or not it meets certification, those types of questions. And then some of the questions that we field after the order has been received, the homeowner may not like some of the options that they ordered. So they wanna know if it's possible to change them. Sliding glass door handles is a big one. You know, the homeowner orders, something, they think that's what they want. They install it, they see what it looks like or how it functions and then they wanna change to something else. And then we would tell them what parts are required to make that happen. And, you know, whether or not it's even feasible to do mm-hmm
Speaker 1 00:06:27 <affirmative> right. And I'm sure it varies because we have a large array of products. Yes. And so does your team support just PGT brand or do you support other brands too? How deep is your team? As far as the brands go,
Speaker 3 00:06:38 We support P G T CGI and WinDor
Speaker 1 00:06:42 Okay. And echo has their own and Western has their own and inland has their own.
Speaker 2 00:06:46 Currently I would have to say that those brands specifically are supporting themselves right. When it comes to product related, you know, questions and, and whatnot. So, right.
Speaker 1 00:06:53 But I'm sure they have, you know, some people in their teams that are deeply familiar with their products and can answer questions. So whether it looks like our structure, you know, we don't know, but right. Yeah. We, we let the brands be their brands right. Until it makes sense to collapse it down. So right. Are there ways for dealers to find out some of this information that they're uncertain of outside of asking for help from our customer care team, be sure to tune in for upcoming episodes to help you understand the Fest industry, what you need to know when buying windows and doors and other related topics, you can find out more about us at PG T I university.com. You can also find us on Facebook and LinkedIn. So is there a place where they can look up information where they can maybe find their own answers instead of waiting on an email or a phone call back from us?
Speaker 2 00:07:50 Yes. We have a site that just recently launched called ProConnect. Okay. ProConnect allows a dealer to log in, um, access additional resources, FAQs specifically, there are
Speaker 3 00:08:03 Quick reference guides.
Speaker 2 00:08:05 That's what I was looking for. There's brochures. There's quick reference guides, which gives some detailed information about the product. There's also the, uh, NOA mm-hmm <affirmative> that they can find, uh, notice of acceptance mm-hmm <affirmative> um, that will give them illustrations of parts, installations, situations, depending on their substrate, you know, what Anchorage they should be using things of that nature. Mm-hmm <affirmative> it also provides design pressures depending on window or unit size, things like that. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so there is some information out there for customers to be able to, um, look and research on their own. And they also have the ability to submit, uh, requests for support to their customer care representatives as well. So.
Speaker 1 00:08:43 Okay. That's awesome. And just a quick plug for the university. If someone doesn't know how to read an NOA, we have a course on that. Oh, we actually have two courses on that. One is just, uh, an online course. It's just a high level overview self-paced you know, e-learning course. And then we actually have an instructor led course that I believe is qualifying for CEU and Jim Heis teaches that. And so he gets into the real nitty gritty around how to read an NOA because it's written by engineers and, you know, you need a translator sometimes when you're looking at that kind of detail on information. And so if you look at an NOA and you're overwhelmed, you can take a class and it'll break it down. It's not so scary.
Speaker 2 00:09:21 That is very good information that we can probably utilize for our team. <laugh> to be honest with you, not necessarily product specialist team, but our customer care representatives in order for us to better service our dealers, we need to make sure that we are supporting our customer care representatives mm-hmm <affirmative> and having them go through something like that would be supremely beneficial for them to be able to provide feedback.
Speaker 1 00:09:40 Well, I can add that to your catalog so that you have access to, and how's that please
Speaker 2 00:09:44 Do
Speaker 1 00:09:45 <laugh> right. I know we do try to work in harmony with each other as far as education components. So some of the things that we educate on are more high level. A lot of the things that you educate on are a little deeper mm-hmm, <affirmative> a little more complex. And so, um, we don't wanna overwhelm customers by giving them the depth that you train to. Uh, but some of them haven't been around a long time and they know it, so right. You know, they can just rattle it off the top of their heads. I'm still in awe at the amount of knowledge that's required for this industry. Anything else we want our dealers to know about this fabulous team?
Speaker 2 00:10:17 I would like to plug in that it's a very special group. Mm-hmm <affirmative> of individuals. It's not a large team whatsoever, as I mentioned, there's only about eight total. So, but the, the level of knowledge and understanding and the things that they do and have to complete day in and day out, just like you were explaining about our dealers have a wealth of knowledge. These guys have an insane amount of knowledge and responsibilities that the team has as well to support the customer care team, the dealer and the business as a whole mm-hmm <affirmative> that maybe our dealers aren't aware of, they're not just focused on, you know, uh, the product end of it, but there's the systems aspect of it. And Sherry there's all kinds of things, right?
Speaker 3 00:10:53 Yeah. Our focus for the systems is making sure that the entry screens are as user friendly as possible for not only for customer care, but for our dealer base, because a large portion of our dealer base enters their own orders. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So we, we spend a lot of time and effort making sure that the questions make sense and the answers are valid for each individual product. So we spend, you know, a great deal of time on the entry systems. And, you know, whenever we try to implement new systems, we always keep the dealer base and their ease of doing business in mind when we're designing those. Right?
Speaker 1 00:11:35 Yeah. Because it's already complicated, absolutely. Trying to make it easy. Well, this has been helpful and informative. And so they should reach out to their customer care representative. If they have questions around product or around quoting systems or ordering systems, they reach out to their customer care rep. What's the best way for them to do that.
Speaker 2 00:11:51 Again, the best way to reach out and get assistance is to utilize the website. ProConnect okay. They'll be able to submit a request to their customer care representative, even if it's a, you know, warranty request a quick question, product question, whatever the case may be. As long as they submit a request through the ProConnect site, it'll go directly to their customer care representative and they will process it in a timely fashion.
Speaker 1 00:12:18 Awesome. Okay. Yeah. I've uh, relied on the product specialist team on a couple of occasions where I've been going through some course material and I'm a little uncertain, I've got conflicting information, like I'm confused and it's almost scary how much they know. I don't know everybody on your team, but the ones I have interacted with are like, oh my gosh, you're walking encyclopedia about, you know, CGI products or PGT products or whatever. So, um, so we're grateful that they're here. We're grateful that they do their job with great diligence in detail. And you guys are obviously doing something right. You've got an amazing team underneath you. Glad that they are here to help support the dealers. Thank
Speaker 2 00:12:53 You.
Speaker 1 00:12:54 Thank you. Thanks for your time today. Happy Friday. Thank you Friday. Enjoy Lifewise. Enjoy your weekend. And uh, we'll talk soon. All
Speaker 2 00:13:01 You for
Speaker 1 00:13:01 Having us. All right. Take care.
Speaker 2 00:13:02 Bye.
Speaker 1 00:13:04 PGT I university is the customer education team for an entire family of brands. We began with the original easy breeze porch enclosure line then became G T America's leading brand of impact resistant windows and doors. We then added CGI C G I C window, Western windows, new south windows, echo windows and doors, and our latest acquisition and Lynn windows and doors. We create products built to withstand major storms, keeping people safe, secure, and prepared. Our exceptional brands give you the protection you need without compromising design or functionality. P G T I university is here to educate you our listener so that you can be more informed about window and door products.
