As you will have read from our previous newsletters Tyron Ball and myself took the helm at the beginning of this year, and this is my first time writing to you in this new capacity.
Industry connection
I grew up like a lot of people in the industry. My afterschool job was sweeping rivets off the factory floor of a small town, family owned window and door business. One thing led to another leaving school and I ended up working for a system supplier and then through another chain of events, joined Soft Tech on the customer support desk. Twenty-three years later here we are – as such I’ve had the unique opportunity to set foot in factories, small to large all over the world, at all ends of the fenestration industry, to help our customers get more windows out the door.
Direction
I recently attended the Zak World of Facades conference, a global series of conferences focusing on Facades/Curtain Wall industry, which I can highly recommend if you get the chance to attend. The conference has a series of 20-30 min tech talks – advancements in technology, risk management, the problems that have to be dealt with doing a big facade/curtain wall. For instance solving light reflectivity off buildings in Sydney in the design stage, or how to get more natural airflow in buildings, custom per project glass coatings, thermal transmission through extrusions, all manner of topics. These conferences help influence our direction at a macro level.
Our biggest influence to our roadmap is from our customers, the feedback we get when we talk to you. Examples of this are our deployment platform which we’ve recently launched to our window suppliers, this enables them to easily push product updates out to their V6 user network. This product was driven from direct customer feedback. Work we are doing behind the scenes on Shop Drawings to speed up the process of generating drawings for your customers & contractors on projects, again heavily influenced by talking to both our large and small customers.
Over the past month we’ve called a few of our customers to get feedback directly. Knowing how busy our customers are, Tyron and myself were both flattered by the amount of time each person we called gave us. I think the shortest call was 15 mins, the longest nearly an hour. Whether it was someone at a large manufacturing facility, or a smaller owner/operator business – each gave us insight, a slightly different lens to look at how we could improve their businesses through our software.
Have your say
We would like to be able to talk to every one of our customers but we know that’s not practically possible. So I thought, why not just ask here – we’ve got technology to help us!
If there are areas in your business you think we could help with, have your say and Start a new topic in this forum. It may be something directly related to our software, or it might be a general problem that you have. Please also leave a contact number and/or email address if you are okay being contacted about it. We will add your feedback into our concrete mixer of ideas to help serve you better.
We know your time is precious, thank you for reading this far, and thanks in advance if you do provide us feedback!
