Our Culture of Service Excellence

It’s the small things …

As construction activity has picked up this spring and everyone is busier, we have started to field questions from several customers about where to find quality contractors for various home improvement projects. More and more, they have expressed mounting frustrations with finding quality tradespeople – in particular, getting them to do what they committed to when they said they would. This got me wondering about how our notions of “Service Excellence”, “Delighting the Customer” and “Quality of Customer Experience” were faring as our workloads increased. I asked the leaders of our Installation and Service/Delivery organizations to identify the big and small initiatives that fall on the plus or minus side of the ledger. They in turn asked their teams to report on the same.

I have previously reported on a big example of Service Excellence. Today however, I was reminded of just how important and impactful our core business philosophy of Service Excellence has become. One of our delivery team members, Todd, told me about a recent window delivery that could have easily gone wrong …
For this particular project, only one window was prepared and delivered to a small contractor customers. It was an awning window that, for installation reasons, was shipped without the sash installed (the part of the window that operates).
Todd could have simply delivered the window as-is, but in response to a question from the customer, he instead took it upon himself to show the contractor how the sash and screen are installed to work properly. It was another example of a self-directed, independent decision to do the right thing for a SolarGlass customer. Todd did not use his delivery schedule as a reason not to help nor did he feel the need to ask questions or get permission to take action.
So, in response to those customers who have asked about quality service people and companies, here’s our advice: Independent decision in the pursuit of Service Excellence is exactly how you can tell if an operating philosophy is a rule or part of the culture – Todd reminds us that it is the latter.