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How Pella Bounced Back From The Housing Crash

Oracle

Pella Corporation, the Iowa-based windows and doors manufacturer, may have just celebrated its 90th anniversary, but the company refuses to show any signs of slowing down.

The company has been fast-tracking its recovery since housing starts plummeted more than 71%, from 1.4 million new homes in 2005 to less than 0.4 million new homes in 2011.

That downturn “marked a significant threat to our business” says Rick Hassman, CIO at Pella.

The lesson of that recession was that Pella needed to continue to build an IT infrastructure that could better adapt to the unpredictable ebbs and flows of the market.

“We don’t know when a market crash or demand spike will come, or from where,” says Hassman. “What we do know is that we have to be ready to respond whenever and wherever the demand is,” he says.

Part of that flexibility is in being able to assign service agents and field techs wherever needed. Hassman says his team now uses Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle Field Service to help the company respond immediately to shifts in demand.

Pella doesn’t simply manufacture its products—it sells them directly to its customers and offers service as well. To keep its customers happy and loyal, its employees must therefore have a much better view of all the company’s interactions with them. It has done this now by integrating its Oracle Service Cloud with Oracle Marketing Cloud and Oracle CRM On Demand Sales, so Pella can not only deploy service agents where demand is growing, it can make the entire customer record available to those agents at the moment the customer calls in, giving them access to the entire history of products owned, purchased, and serviced.

“Having these capabilities provides an experience that our competition can’t deliver,” says Hassman.

“Even our closest competitor sells through lumber yards and uses third-party companies to install and service their products,” says Hassman. “Not Pella. We own our entire value chain,” he says.

With Oracle Service Cloud, “our local field service branch in Chicago now has access to the same customer data that a customer service agent in our Pella Iowa corporate contact center sees. This is a huge competitive advantage for us,” says Hassman.

Prior to the cloud, the company was using Oracle E-Business Suite for its corporate contact center and a homegrown, vintage system for its sales branches.

Because those two systems didn’t communicate with each other, customers had a difficult time getting the same answer from two different agents, and agents had difficulty knowing if a conversation with a customer had even taken place.

Bridging a Gap

“We had two pretty good 180s, but no 360-degree picture of our customer’s history with us,” says Ryan Davis, director of corporate applications at Pella.

Bridging this gap was critical. That’s why the first project involving Oracle Service Cloud was to get the company’s corporate contact center and all of its individual sales branch systems on the same platform.

Because the cloud makes it easy to integrate Pella’s back-end systems with customer profiles and transaction histories, its agents can find detailed information about exactly what products are installed, when they were installed, and by whom.

Capturing this level of detail is important for Pella’s business, because windows have a unique ownership lifecycle that many other products don’t have. When a home is sold, for example, and a new owner moves in, the windows are no longer the property of the person who bought them originally—they belong to the new homeowner.

“That’s why we capture product information at the address level, and not just at the customer level,” says Davis.

The company used to send its service techs out the vast majority of the time, even for a basic diagnostic evaluation. Today, Oracle Service Cloud enables Pella to resolve more than 50% of customer problems during a single call, without dispatching an agent.

Oracle Service Cloud also helps connect Pella service technicians in the field to the corporate contact center via their mobile devices.

“Whether a tech is running ahead of schedule or behind, we can see the status right on our dashboard and immediately let customers know if they are going to be impacted,” says Skip Barrick, director of order fulfillment at Pella.

Performance Measures

Pella is also changing the way it thinks about and measures service performance.

Since implementing Oracle Service Cloud, Pella’s call handling times have actually remained flat or in some cases even increased. That’s because its service agents and field techs are solving more service issues on the first call than ever before. Today, service agents may have one 8-minute call, versus two 6-minute calls.

We are not coaching our agents to get off the phone as quickly as possible. We are coaching them to deliver a high-quality customer experience and solve the customer’s problem completely,” says Arvin Pleima, director of customer service and logistics at Pella.

Since moving its service operations to the cloud, 75% of the time Pella has been able to solve a particular customer service issue within the first 24 hours of it being reported.

“This simply couldn’t have been measured before,” says Pleima. “It would have been anecdotal data at best. The cloud actually gives us hard data that proves how effective our service is,” he says.

In addition to first-call resolution rates, Pella is also using Oracle Service Cloud to track the most recent week, month, or even years of service histories, and to analyze issues by frequency, customer, and resolution outcomes.

“We can then start homing in on what we need to do as far as training our agents and determining what feedback we should provide to the engineering team to help them improve product design,” says Pleima.

Pella is implementing Oracle Identity Management so that its agents, field service techs, and customers can log in at any time they want, from whatever device they want—with granular access controls designed to ensure that the right people see only the information they need and are entitled to get.

“We actually feel our data is more secure in the cloud,” says Hassman. “Oracle has far more experience in managing security than we do.”

As the company looks to the future, it believes the cloud will continue playing an integral role in managing existing relationships while supporting expansion into new ones.

“The premium market is a large component of our differentiation and growth within the market,” says Heidi Farmer, a Pella spokesperson. “This is giving us an opportunity to elevate the Pella brand with contractors and architects—new types of customers who wouldn’t necessarily have thought of us before,” she says.

But with these new and different audiences, it’s important for Pella to keep customer service at the forefront.

“The premium market has different requirements and expectations when it comes to customer service,” says Farmer. “This is why we need to consistently improve our ability to deliver the best service possible. And that is exactly what the cloud is helping us to do.”

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