SolidWorks Customer Relations Gets a Boost

To make sure existing customers and VARS keep smiling at future SolidWorks user meetings, SolidWorks has hired a new VP of Worldwide Customer Services

by Roopinder Tara, Editor, TenLinks, March 27, 2006

It must occur to all companies that at some point they can be hindered by their own growth. The bright idea from which they were spawned seems to be insufficient for future growth. In Sam Walton’s autobiography, he recalls how his Wal-Mart chain could get no bigger because there wasn’t enough of a logistical structure to support warehousing and distribution. Wal-Mart had to computerize.

Computerization of operations should have been a no-brainer for a software company, but as late as Richard Welch's appearance on the scene at SolidWorks in 2005, thousands of orders were still coming in by fax.

Welch spent his first several months on the job visiting the company’s VARs in the United States and Europe. I was ready for him to say "tough job but someone has to do it," but Welch takes this very seriously. During his travels, he realized he needed to create a system of objective measurements so he could determine his organization's progress. After nine months on the job, VAR transactional satisfaction, as measured by surveys, was on the upswing moving up over 25% in that short time frame but there were still improvements to be made. Welch noticed some process issues with order fulfillment -- specifically, the product was just not getting out the door as quickly as the company would like.

Welch also counts among his successes that by December 2005 over 50% of all SolidWorks' orders were being automatically processed and that VARs were utilizing the web based portal for 100% of their order requests.

Welch is in charge of SolidWorks' Customer Services including training, tech support, order administration, customer center, subscription services, implementation services and more. Most of SolidWorks' call center personnel had been located in the Boston area but since SolidWorks' software is utilized worldwide, the company has seen a need to "follow the sun." Expansion also would mean support in more local languages, not just English. These now include language support in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese and Korean.

Welch is a numbers man. Well, he is an engineer. He can reel off support center wait times: "30 seconds for the phone" and "30 minutes for email." I wonder if he could speak to our local phone company.

Welch’s agenda is to make support for SolidWorks’ products a competitive advantage for the company, their reseller community and especially for their customers. By his reckoning, he hasn’t much competition. Autodesk support is practically nonexistent and PTC had been cutting back.¹ Support is not limited to phone and e-mail. SolidWorks' online knowledge base that is currently available to their reseller community will soon be delivered to the end customers to help answer their questions more rapidly.

Footnotes

1. PTC did announce that they are hiring again at their 2006 press event, with 700 new employees added last year.

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