IronRidge has placed a lot of focus on a cycle of training and customer feedback. The company hired a dedicated training manager in 2012.
Solar FlexRack released a new tracker late last year, but then-CEO Tom Meola was as eager to talk about the new technology as he was about the company’s customer service offerings. “Our objective is to make the customer’s project easier by providing a full slate of engineering, project management, construction and value-add services, rather than having the customer engage multiple firms for these services,” he said.
As the mounting industry reaches a perceived sense of homeostasis, companies are looking for ways to differentiate themselves, and customer service is a big one.
“It’s a broad and important realm—the idea of service is what makes you more than just a piece of hardware,” said David Briggs, vice president of marketing at IronRidge. “As a business, if you’re not focused on the service, you’re not focused on the customer.”
Briggs said product education and supporting application needs are all equal parts of the equation. IronRidge has placed a lot of focus on a cycle of training and customer feedback. The company hired a dedicated training manager in 2012.
“You’ve got to want to please the customer,” said Don Massa, product manager at Mounting Systems. “When customers have requests that are out of the ordinary, our first response is to see if we can honor that request. That’s part of the overall attitude here—taking care of the customer is job No. 1.”
When customers ask for very specific services, Mounting Systems has taken the approach of aligning themselves with expert partners.
“This can be more productive than trying to take on too much, and extending yourself beyond your areas of expertise,” Massa said. “That’s not to say we wouldn’t ever do [various services], but when other people can do what we need done at the right price and in the right way, it’s better for us and the customer to take advantage of that.”
Michael Maulick, CEO of SunLink, said a major driver of customer service offerings is the increasing sophistication of the industry.
“EPCs and developers are getting more sophisticated and realizing they need a solution instead of a bag of parts, otherwise they hold liability,” Maulic said. “So we’re offering services before the design, then we design, we provide the solution, then we provide the O&M and installation services, and that’s what we call PowerCare suite of services, and I believe that will become a trend.”