Since 1977, Professional Flooring Supply (PFS) has been committed to providing floor-covering professionals with top-quality flooring and excellent customer service, setting the groundwork for their success to expand across eight states with 17 stores.
DJ Lee has been with PFS for over 19 years and has served as the President for nearly nine. He uses the advantage of a customer-centric model to drive business decisions to delineate a clear path forward as the leader in floor-covering distributors. “It's not always about the way that I would like to get it done, it's a matter of what the client wants,” says DJ. “And if we focus our efforts on how they choose to do business, then more and more we’ll be a supplier of choice to them.”
But DJ also understands that to provide the best service to their clients, they need efficient communication and easy access to the information customers seek.
That challenge of meeting customer expectations and providing accurate answers in a timely manner brought DJ to start leveraging text messaging through Prokeep across his 17 stores in 2021:
Challenges Before Prokeep:
Before implementing Prokeep across their 17 branches, Professional Flooring Supply faced challenges in meeting customer needs quickly and effectively. By relying on phone calls and emails they were rolling the dice on whether their customers would get the information they needed as quickly as they needed it to get their projects moving efficiently.
Miscommunications due to inefficient internal communication
“So I would say that the main challenge that we face is not a competitive challenge, it's more of the internal communication challenge… understanding at a given time frame for the project and who's involved, who needs what information, when do they need it, and how do they need it? There are any number of things that create challenges for us. Most of it tends to, in my experience, come down to who needs what information, when they need it, and how can we deliver it as seamlessly as possible.”
Management visibility
“If I don't know there's an issue, then I can't help to resolve it. It’s about the visibility of what are the challenges that a given team is facing so that I can step in where I need to or stay out of the way if I can, to help things move as effectively as possible.”
Phone congestion and timeliness
“We're blessed to be very busy a lot of the time. And for us, a lot of times our clients need information, and they need it quickly. Well, if you were to call in and let's say it's 7:45 in the morning and I've got 4 or 5 people on the order desk, and they're all busy taking care of clients, whether those clients are right there in front of them or on the phone or whatever the case may be… you would have to wait.”
Phone calls are like rolling the dice on information expertise
“When a customer contacts us, we need to be able to quickly access information and deliver answers quickly, and before Prokeep, when you call us, you get who picked up the phone. They may not have the information you need and you’ll have to get passed along or wait.”
Slow means of delivering relevant and timely information
“Let's say I've got something that's going on today, right now, and I need to contact my clients with that information and I send them an email. What if they're not going to check that email until they get back to the office at the end of the day? I mean, the number of emails that I get on a given day, it could take me an hour and a half just to go through the emails that I don't want to read.”
Prokeep Solutions
After implementing Prokeep, DJ soon saw that PFS customers preferred texting into the branch. And because a single customer text hits everyone at that branch at the same time, the right person was always available to quickly provide answers. Plus, with text message broadcasts, PFS was able to directly engage all of their customers in the channel that made the most sense for immediate and pertinent communication.
One inbox for faster answers
“Prokeep allows for our clients to reach out to the folks that they do business with every day in sort of a person-agnostic method. So they reach out to us and use our branch phone number that they've known for years and hopefully have stored in their phone. And they say, I have a question about pricing or I have a question around inventory levels, or I'd like to know if this order is ready to go or whatever the case may be, and it hits everybody at that location at the same time and allows our folks to say, yes, I'll handle that question. And it goes away. And it takes that information and puts it in a text stream, which is something everybody's familiar with.”
Communication on the customer’s time, not on-hold
“It's a very quick and easy way that allows for the communication to happen between our client and our people. And they can do it on their time and they can do it quickly.”
Searchable communication history
“All the information tied to whatever the communication is with that client, it's searchable in that text string. So if I say that it's on this reference number or this purchase order number or about this item number, I'm able to go in Prokeep and search that, find it really quickly, and say, ‘okay, this is what we're talking about.’ And I can very quickly get to the root of what it is I need to get to without searching through just any number of other methods of contact. It's just a very fast and easy way that folks are accustomed to using because it's a text string.”
More options, more business
“So Prokeep has allowed us to say to our customers, ‘If you need to contact us really quickly about this question or that question, you can text us and we can quickly respond back to you with whatever the answer is.’ And that's what we are about at Professional Flooring Supply, trying to make sure that our clients have access to options and solutions that help make their jobs that much easier or more productive.”
Faster answers from the right person
“Previously you call and you get who picked up the phone. Now you text and you get somebody quickly and somebody who knows the answer to that question. If they don't know the answer to that question, they're not going to claim that message. They're going to send it to somebody else and let them take care of it for you. So it's just a really easy way for our clients to get information from us and our team. And it's accurate.”
Customer-centric technology
“It's all about taking what the client needs and looking at the technology backward. Not having this cool technology and saying, what can I make my clients see? It's about what they need and moving backward from there. And from a standpoint of gaining information access. Prokeep I think has successfully done that.”
Accurate information, on time
“Without Prokeep, I wouldn't be able to consistently and accurately convey information to my clients. Prokeep is able to take a technology that everybody uses in their daily life and bring it to our business. That it gives my clients what they want, that is value to me.”
Conclusion
Under DJ Lee's leadership, Professional Flooring Supply has successfully navigated the evolving demands of the flooring industry, emphasizing a customer-centric approach to business decisions. The introduction of Prokeep in 2021 marked a significant milestone in enhancing communication and service delivery across PFS's 17 branches. By leveraging a centralized text messaging platform, PFS has streamlined its communication process, both externally to customers and internally amongst teams, departments, and branches. By giving customers options in the way they wish to do business with PFS, DJ continues to position PFS as an industry leader focused on technology that meets the needs of its customers, not a business that adopts technology for its bells and whistles.
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