Overall Excellence
Leadership in the Homeowner Market

Technology Measures Feldco’s “Customer Delight”

The management team at Feldco doesn’t aim to reinvent the proverbial wheel when it comes to selling windows and doors. The company sticks to pretty traditional marketing initiatives and offers simple, yet efficient product lines to its potential customers in Chicago and Rockford, Ill. The key to the company’s success is not changing the process of how homeowners buy replacement windows—it’s making the process cleaner, simpler and more efficient.

“What we’ve learned over the years is that when we try to be Baskin Robbins, being everything to everybody, that’s just not a feasible approach to business,” says Doug Cook, president. “What we’ve done is take a DQ approach. A chocolate and vanilla approach. You can do all sorts of fun things with chocolate and vanilla. We’re trying to do more with less in an effort to be more consistent.”

Keeping things simple has been increasingly challenging for the company as it continues to grow into new geographic territories, as well as within its already-established markets. More customers mean more staff—and more chances for things to go wrong. That’s why Cook and his executive management team have thrown their weight behind new and constantly expanding information technology initiatives. The company’s leaders aim to deliver a consistent experience from location to location and believe IT will be the foundation upon which the Feldco growth plan can be built.

“One of the reasons national companies are successful is consistency,” Cook says. “We want to make sure that what makes us successful in Chicago goes with us to other areas. We want that Feldco way of doing business to carry with us. It makes us a strong brand.”

Feldco’s attention to technology infrastructure is catching the attention of customers and suppliers alike. The concept of using technology to get things done efficiently is something society, for the most part, has embraced, but it’s still relatively unusual to see a window company pouring financial resources into it over the traditional frontrunners of sales and marketing, says Bob Franco, president of Alside Supply Centers for Associated Materials.

“Companies in our industry forget that they are businesses,” he contends. “All too often, many remodelers grow at a rapid rate, and they lose control. What Feldco has recognized [is] that they are indeed a business and they need to have technology that allows them to control their growth [and] deliver customer satisfaction.

“You can no longer run a business on the back of a napkin,” he adds.

Feldco takes customer service to a new level with its sizeable investment in technological improvements, adds David Rascoe, president of Thermal Industries Inc., a division of Atrium. “We have never had another customer with this type of infrastructure dedicated towards total customer satisfaction,” he says.

AN OLD DOG WITH NEW TRICKS
Feldco is currently in the 2.0 version of itself. The company was founded more than 30 years ago by Bernie Feld, a man who came to be well known both in the window and door industry and among the homeowners in the greater Chicago region. The company’s catchy jingle and distinctive orange logo have been catching buyers’ eyes for several generations now.

As Feld neared retirement in 2000, new ownership stepped in to take the company forward. Cook, with a master’s of business administration, was seeking an opportunity to run his own business when he learned of the dealership’s situation. He was excited by the growth opportunity in the industry and impressed with the reputation Feldco had in the region. So he bought the company and set about learning the business, relying on company veterans to bring him up to speed on the specifics of the industry. He also hired, over time, a management team of business-savvy, non-industry professionals. Windows and doors, he figured, they could all learn, but the business foundation is what would help Feldco enter a new generation of doing things. “I didn’t come in here with a plan to revolutionize the business,” Cook says. “I wanted to challenge convention and, in the process, have some fun.”

Cook had a simple plan—build on the trusted Feldco name with operating efficiencies that allowed the company to grow. He began boosting the investments he was making in IT infrastructure, bringing on additional staffers to build and maintain an operating system that would replace the traditional paper trail with computerized forms, systems, tracking tools and performance reports. In the last several years, nearly every element of the business, starting with the initial intake of a lead all the way through installation and follow-up, has come to be processed electronically. To its customers, Feldco looks and feels like a traditional home improvement retailer. But internally, the dealer relies on its computerized systems to get things right the first time, nearly every time. The result is often happy customers who are willing to tell their friends about how easy the Feldco experience is.

The company’s suppliers, many of which had been working with the company for years, quickly fell in line with the new rhythm. “I remember the day a manager called me and asked what our delivery time was on a given product type,” recalls Brian Barbieri, president of Home Guard Industries Inc., one of the company’s suppliers. “When I responded with round figures, he proceeded to give me the exact days it took to deliver each order as well as the average number of days and how many units were outside the acceptable parameters. It was that day we began to systematically measure our performance more closely and have been improving our numbers ever since.”

In the eight years since Cook took the reins, the company has built a culture around the measurement of performance, and continues to invest heavily in additional systems as it grows, Barbieri notes. “The new Feldco is a retail machine that has fine-tuned marketing techniques, harnessed the power of a great installation system—known to Feldco as fulfillment—and focused on customer satisfaction to ensure referrals to be a major source for lead generation,” he says. “Everything Feldco does gets measured and as a result is constantly improving.”

Feldco calls its business philosophy “Customer Delight” and uses its quantitative data to provide ongoing training for all of its employees, explains Patty Freko, director of marketing. “We at Feldco believe in putting the customer first, making it easy for customers to do business with us and ensuring they are always satisfied with our products and services, from the first call or visit to our showroom, to after the final installation.”

Happy customers may seem a simple enough mission for a home improvement company, but what impresses most is how Feldco is able to maintain their “customer delight” philosophy at its increasing volume. “Early on, I was always impressed with the way Feldco was able to operate at such a high volume and still maintain customer satisfaction and such a large market share,” Barbieri says.

FELDCO 3.0
Feldco is working hard to create version 3.0 of itself, moving into the future using additionally enhanced technology to speed up scheduling, make measurements more consistent, ensure more reliable purchasing efforts, even getting products from its suppliers faster. “The net figure out of all of this is what we call the ‘first time quality.’ We want to make sure that the first time we go out with a product, it’s right,” Cook says.

It seems to be working. The company has seen a ‘first time quality’ increase, year-over-year, of more than 20 percent, he reports. “We’ve really started to quantify it. We’ve been able to use measurement metrics to really understand what’s going on in our business. We can really understand where we’re doing well and where we need to do things better.”

A little more than a year ago, Feldco expanded for the first time outside the greater Chicago region, opening a fourth location in Rockford, Ill., about 90 miles northwest of Chicago. The company had some brand recognition in the outlying region, but looked at the expansion as a “guinea pig” of taking the show on the road. The new site put the company’s IT system and marketing approach to the test, Cook explains, and taught the executive team some valuable lessons about the adjustments that come with expansion plans. “We started up a brand new operation in a new market with a new approach,” he explains. “We looked at it as a laboratory for us for future growth. Getting [that site] up and running resulted in the evolution of our brand, experimentation with new products and some [existing] product changes.”

The leadership is researching the next steps for the company, which will likely include expansion into Wisconsin in 2008.
Feldco provides its customers private-label products from a number of suppliers, and with additional sites in the works, the company is banking on its solid IT platform to keep operations running smoothly. “What we’re aiming to do is basically have a single point of entry,” Cook says. “We will take into the system the lead and then everything will be worked off of that. We want to be a paperless operation. When you default to heavy [reliance on] paper processes, you basically get into a zone of high variability. Anything we can do to reduce and eliminate that variability through IT standards is what we’re looking for.”

Although the company has solid brand recognition in the areas it serves, Freko and the management team have turned to the IT systems for marketing help to more directly target potential customers, deliver more customized messages to different areas and combat the falling circulation numbers at local publications, where the company traditionally does the bulk of its advertising. “We’re pretty consistent with the marketing we’ve done in the past, but with the help of IT, we’ve been able to look at specific zip codes and target areas where sales have fallen off. We use direct mail and canvassing to tailor a message differently for some areas.”

“We’ve been able to use our IT systems to better dissect our marketplace,” Cook adds. “We’ve continued with some of the oldest marketing methods—canvassing, direct mail—but we’ve been able to use those more efficiently, more productively.”

Those watching Feldco progress are confident that the dealer’s dedication to IT efforts will lead to continued growth opportunities. “I clearly believe that the investment in technology will pay big dividends for their organization as they grow,” says Home Guard’s Barbieri. “Many company’s struggle with growth because they have inadequate systems to support their efforts. I feel strongly that this is an area where Feldco will continue to outpace the industry.”

SMOOTH SAILING
For all of the intricate technological processes and measurement systems on which Feldco relies internally, most outsiders just see a smooth, simple operation. The dealer is about as well rounded as they come in this industry—impressing its suppliers and customers with its consistency, taking a very active role in its community with numerous charitable efforts, and working to keep the thank you letters and solid Better Business Bureau rankings rolling in. “Once we selected Feldco, every aspect of the process went exactly as advertised,” says customer Peter Berg of Naperville, Ill. “The communications, measuring, scheduling and installation all happened flawlessly.”

The company has in-house installation crews, but also uses some sub-contractors, which sing the company’s praises. “From measuring to installing, to following up post-install, Feldco is there, and always has been there for its customers,” says Marek Jarocki of Samco Windows. “As a sub-contractor, I know this first hand because I have been with Feldco for 11 years. That says a lot about a company with long-term commitments.”

“Feldco provides a very positive image for the industry,” says Alside’s Franco. “When you are a market leader, as Feldco is, you are held to a higher standard of excellence and they have certainly been up to this challenge. There are thousands of customers annually who experience the value and benefit of working with Feldco.”