As the busy season continues to heat up for us at Orenda, Eric and Jarred share a glimpse of how overwhelmed we are with inbound phone calls and other help requests. So this episode is to guide customers on how best to contact us while being respectful of our time and our limited bandwidth. We want to help everyone who contacts us, so please be patient with us and ask your questions clearly.
00:00 - Introduction
01:33 - There are a finite number of hours in the workweek
03:10 - Phone help line and emails
07:18 - Voicemail
09:25 - Use our help center, ask.orendatech.com
10:36 - We are not legal expert witnesses, so please don't ask us to be
12:32 - Inbound contact requests
13:38 - If you do have to call us, please be direct
16:19 - Give us time to respond...and we will
16:46 - What a good phone call sounds like
18:22 - Summary. Thanks for listening!
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Connect with Orenda Technologies
Website: https://www.orendatech.com
Help Center: https://ask.orendatech.com
Blog: https://blog.orendatech.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/OrendaTechnologies
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/orendatech/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/orendatechnologies/
Swim Across America | Team Orenda: https://www.swimacrossamerica.org/goto/orenda
102. How to contact us at Orenda (the right way)
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[00:00:00] Jarred Morgan: Hello everybody. This is Jarred, your host of the Rule Your Pool podcast today. And Eric has been going solo here for the last few episodes, and I felt like I was going to give him a break. It's busy for us. And I think he's kind of reaching his breaking point and it's hard to produce content, everybody. So, um,
[00:00:21] Eric Knight: And yet here I am sitting right here next to you in Texas, not home.
[00:00:26] Jarred Morgan: You're right
[00:00:26] Eric Knight: But in Texas.
[00:00:27] Jarred Morgan: We did make him come to Texas for filming our Commercial Academy that we're producing. So it's going to be awesome. I know it's a little bit of a teaser, but, Eric loves to travel. He loves to be away from his house. He loves to be on airplanes, especially in the middle seat. And it's just what we do. So
[00:00:43] Eric Knight: I'm beginning to suspect that you have me traveling so much so that I cannot record podcast episodes alone, and that you just so desperately wanted to be back on the show to communicate with all 106 of our listeners, or so. It's an estimate.
[00:00:58] Jarred Morgan: Well, as the host, it's my job to make sure this podcast moves in the right direction.
[00:01:03] Eric Knight: Bro. Let's not say things we can't take back. Well, anyway, this is the 102nd episode of the Rule Your Pool podcast. And today we are talking about why we're so busy and how to contact us at Orenda the right way.
[00:01:18] There are only so many hours in a week and we want to provide the best customer service possible. How can you actually contact us the correct way? You want to add anything to that?
[00:01:27] Jarred Morgan: No, I think we're going to add plenty into it after this sweet intro.
A finite number of hours in the workweek
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[00:01:33] Eric Knight: So, as I was saying, there are limited hours in the workday, and limited hours in the workweek. As if we work just working hours. I mean, let's be honest. I was taking calls after 8:00 PM last night because of west coast people. And you know, probably I shouldn't do that. And I should blame myself, but there's so many people that want to talk to us. We need to be able to answer the phone and be responsive.
[00:02:13] I get texts late. People don't know where in the country we are. I get calls when I'm in California. Like last week I was getting calls at 4:00 AM. Yeah, but 4:00 AM is 7:00 AM on the east coast and pool guys are up early. So, you know, we have some boundaries on what we are actually capable of doing.
[00:02:29] You know, Jarred and I are not the only people that Orenda. Everybody else in Orenda is busy too. But we just want to give you a taste of what our day looks like.
[00:02:36] Jarred Morgan: And not just that. As we get warmer heading to the end of March into April and May, it gets really, really busy. So we're doing this just to give you an idea, or at least help us help you get information faster. Get help faster. So that we can all be as hopefully efficient as possible.
[00:02:55] Eric Knight: Let's go through some statistics, just so people have a glimpse. And I know you can't read the show notes because you're Jarred, but they are right in front of you. How about you aim your eyes at the show notes and give it a try. The water's warm. I want to try, try reading those few bullet points there.
Phone help line and emails
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[00:03:10] Jarred Morgan: I can't read through this microphone. But I answer the phone. I'm number one on the call list. Eric's number two. We roll through everybody else as it comes through, so you will eventually get somebody on our team to help you. And we want to be real people that have knowledge of our chemicals and chemistry in general, so that we can help you regardless if it has anything to do with our specific products.
[00:03:33] So we want to make sure we provide that experience to you, our customers, homeowners, whoever it may be, so that we can effectively help you solve your problems. And then you get into the emails. Emails come directly to me and Eric first, but then we can deliver them out from there to make sure that you get the help you need if you're in a specific territory, or you need a rep to come out and help you.
[00:03:56] And that's for service guys. Homeowners, we don't make house calls. We've been asked multiple times if somebody could pay us to come out and help them, and this, that and the other. And the answer is no. That's what service professionals are for. We provide support to the service professionals in this industry.
[00:04:13] Eric Knight: And even if we could, we don't have the bandwidth.
[00:04:15] Jarred Morgan: No, we cannot.
[00:04:16] Eric Knight: It's a huge country, we just do not have the ability to do that. And that's not even including the personal emails. You're just talking about inbound through the website, and the contact us on the forms and stuff. Yeah. They come to us. They also come to Laura. So we have three people that are managing those. And then we try to delegate those out to the appropriate regional managers, local reps. But even that takes time.
[00:04:36] That's a process. I have to figure out, okay, who are you? Where are you from? If you don't tell me in the email where you're located, I don't know who to send you to.
[00:04:43] Jarred Morgan: But not just that. I want to tell everybody who's listening that has sent us an email, or is thinking about sending us an email. We really love getting the emails about how much we've helped your business, or how much we've changed your pool, or anything like that. That is just something we share internally as a company. Cause it's, that's a win. That's a win for us.
[00:05:00] Eric Knight: They totally make our days. So we do appreciate those for sure. But let's go through just a few numbers and this is not a venting session by any means. This is really more of just giving you a glimpse of why it takes so long for us to get back to you sometimes.
[00:05:13] Jarred Morgan: And hopefully give you a solution to getting an answer faster if we are delayed in getting back to you.
[00:05:18] Eric Knight: Absolutely. Okay. So I can only speak for myself. I don't know your numbers. I imagine they're just as high, if not higher. I average over 80 new emails a day. My phone records show. I average over 30 calls a day. Now some of those are rolled over from the hotline and those are just the people that you don't answer that roll to me. If you're on the phone, you know, it comes to my line and then if I don't answer, it goes to Joe, et cetera.
[00:05:42] So we don't know who those people are. They're always unknown numbers and in a typical day, at this time of the year, we're averaging what, about 30 of those a day? Hotline calls?
[00:05:51] Jarred Morgan: Yes. Probably roughly varies.
[00:05:53] Eric Knight: In the summer, it's well over 50, closer to 100 a day. Now think about this for a second. If you are calling us for something that you could have been helped by reading something on the website or something, and you take more than five minutes of our time. Let's just say it's a five minute call, brief phone call, cordial, everything's good. You get what you need and you move on.
[00:06:14] A five minute call. Well, let's do the math on that. I can do 12 of those in an hour. If I'm only talking on the phone. With no time in between. And how many hours in the day are there?
[00:06:28] Jarred Morgan: Last I checked, I think there's 24. Okay. And we have a 24 hour Workday.
[00:06:32] Eric Knight: Yeah, exactly. 24 hour work day. Good call. So just sheer numbers, we cannot actually talk to every single person. And most calls are way longer than five minutes. And we try to be respectful, but you need to be respectful of our time too. Just straight up, you cannot take 20 minutes of our time to ask a simple question.
[00:06:54] If you're calling us the most respectful thing you can do for us is do your homework before you call. And the second most respectful, if you need to call us, please be direct with your question. Get it out. Ask the question, let us answer it and let us move on because there are other people waiting in the queue that are being sent into our voicemail system. Because if you call the helpline and it goes to a voicemail that actually goes to our email, not our phone.
Voicemail
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[00:07:18] Jarred Morgan: Which is great.
[00:07:18] Eric Knight: Which is great, but it also gets buried in email. And then we have to listen to it and I have to share it. So if like, if you reach out to us, whether it's through the website or the phone, we don't know who you are. Thank you for calling us, don't get me wrong, but we need to know, okay, how do I get you the best help possible? And by the way, I have other things I have to do in my job.
[00:07:38] Jarred Morgan: I would recommend that if you do call and you don't get one of us to answer, which hopefully you do. That's the ultimate goal is that somebody along this chain is going to answer your call. So, but if for some reason we don't, please leave a voicemail. Don't just repeatedly call again, because it's just going to go through the same thing. Leave a voicemail because I will get an email or Eric will get an email. And then we can delegate that out to somebody who's specifically capable to answer that question, or they're in your territory, or they have specific knowledge to what you're dealing with.
[00:08:07] Um, or we'll call you back. If I get an email gets a voicemail that you left, I will call you back. But it might take, you know, some time. So if you need immediate help, try to look on our website. We generally try to come up with solutions to any problems that we can think of and answer them on our website.
[00:08:25] And obviously if you need reinforcement with a phone call, that's what we're for.
[00:08:28] Eric Knight: Yeah. And we do want to talk to you, but please be respectful of our time, be quick. Uh, one more thing about the hotline it rolls onto the next person. Well, if you're not getting someone, there's a really high probability we are all in the same place, like at a trade show. And there's six of us at the booth. Or we're all traveling. Like two weeks ago, nobody was home. We were all in four different events, Southwest show, NPC in San Diego, Shaun was at Baystate in Delaware, people were in Florida.
[00:08:56] Last week we were at Carecraft, we had the Pentair training in Temecula. We had the Florida show. Like we're always on the move. We're either on airplanes or with customers already. So if it rolls through and you can't get us, that's probably why. We're not ignoring you. We're busy. We can't answer our phones.
[00:09:14] So when you leave a voicemail, please tell us where you're located. Who are you? Are you a homeowner? Are you in the trade? It helps us know who to get you to, or how to respond to you the most effective way.
Orenda's Help Center, ask.orendatech.com
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[00:09:25] Jarred Morgan: Now, Eric came up with this cool place on our website because of these inquiries that we get. Where do I need to go? If I'm looking for an answer or help, Eric?
[00:09:37] Eric Knight: While you push help on the website or you go to the app in the main menu and you go down to training and more, and select help. That is our help center. It's ask.orendatech.com. The entire purpose of this place is to find quick answers.
[00:09:51] Now we're building it. It's a growing project, but if you don't see the answer to your question, and it's not in the blog, it's not in our procedures. At the very top of the help center, you can push submit a question. Ask us there. That is the best place to ask us a question. It is not to call us.
[00:10:08] It is to ask us. You can also email podcast@orendatech.com. You can email ask@orendatech.com. But those don't go through our system. I would much rather use submit your question through the system. Because then we can effectively answer it and we can actually share it amongst ourselves to get it to the most appropriate person. It's a much more efficient way for us to get back to you with a quick answer.
[00:10:30] And maybe you have a great question that other people are asking, we're going to create another help article. That's how we know what to write.
We are not legal expert witnesses, so don't ask us to be
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[00:10:36] Jarred Morgan: We will. And at the same time, we give these resources and these tools to help you. We want to help you. But there's something that happens occasionally when somebody calls or they submit an email request.
[00:10:49] If you're trying to put us in a position of pinning let's say you against a plaster company, or a manufacturer, or find fault somewhere along this trail. That is not our job, everyone. We're not here to dog anybody in this industry or a manufacturer of any, any type of manufacturer. Whether it be a chemical manufacturer, equipment manufacturer, plaster company, plaster manufacturer, it doesn't matter.
[00:11:16] We do not know the whole picture. Okay. And we're not going to know the whole picture if you do call. So we are not going to speculate on what may or may not have happened to get us into some sort of hot water. So just understand that we're not going to go down that road. We're here to help you. We can answer questions, but we're not going to place blame, alright?
[00:11:36] Eric Knight: We're not going to throw anyone under the bus. We are not expert witnesses. We are not legally allowed to provide expert witness services. You need to get experts locally if that's the case. And I know a lot of people ask for our opinions, but like Jarred said, we don't know the whole story. We weren't there. We had nothing to do with it.
[00:11:54] People ask us because we publish a lot of information about it, but a lot of homeowners that call us, they want to blame somebody. And I get it, you're upset about something.
[00:12:02] Jarred Morgan: The biggest one I get is weepers, or my gunite has cracks, or I have a crack in my plaster, or all these things that are structural in nature. Or they started at the build process and throughout. That's not our game. We're here to help you. But, I'm not an expert. There are experts in this industry that know what they're talking about.
[00:12:20] Eric Knight: That's right. Find an expert witness that is qualified to do that. And please don't bring that to us. That's just not our space. But let's go through some extra statistics here of what our day looks like.
Inbound contact requests
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[00:12:32] Eric Knight: We got all those emails that we mentioned. We get blog comments every day. Well, we've got over a hundred blogs. I don't know how many a day we get, but it's a lot. We get YouTube comments every day on our videos. We get emails on podcast@orendatech.com and ask@orendatech.com, questions every day. Help center submissions, which is the right way to do it, by the way, we get those every day.
[00:12:53] You know, I'm averaging, I don't know, seven to 10 a day, which is great. I prefer those. I mean, if, if we took all of the amount of calls and the amount of emails and other forms of contacting us through the help center and we had a hundred a day, I'd be a happy man. Because we can actually efficiently get through that.
[00:13:11] We have the resources, you just need to know where to look. So what we encourage you to do is do the homework and search our site first. Almost every call we get, Jarred, almost every single one is answered on our website already. That's why we created it. And we don't just write it. We have videos, we have podcasts, we have multiple different mediums to find the information you're after.
[00:13:32] You may not know exactly how to search for it. But it's usually there. And that's why everything's shareable on the app.
If you have to call us...please be direct
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[00:13:38] Jarred Morgan: And I'd say there are times where you have to call. Or you feel like you need to call to get a quick answer. We are happy to help you out.
[00:13:45] But if you do have that, just have your question ready. We know the backstory of pretty much every pool that comes in. We've heard a lot of these questions. We've heard a lot of these problems. We don't need the years worth of backstory. But you know, we're going to ask questions where we'll ask you questions like, Hey, what is your water chemistry? What is your temperature?
[00:14:03] We'll ask general questions that will help us give you an answer. Sure. So just be prepared for that.
[00:14:09] Eric Knight: I would say this, this is my opinion, just in answering so many of these calls. If you can't ask your question in the first 15 to 20 seconds of the call, you're not ready to call.
[00:14:21] Think about what you were calling us for. If you can't articulate what you actually want from us, think and write down notes before you call us. It really helps. And that's not an arrogance thing. That's a way to communicate more effectively. Be sure you are clear in what you're asking. Because a lot of people call it and they don't actually know what they're asking. They're just frustrated.
[00:14:42] But that becomes a 10, 15, 20 minute call. 20 minutes? That's a huge chunk of our day with regard to all the other people that are reaching out to us. And by the way, this is just inbound contact. This has nothing to do with our actual jobs, where we are creating new content and actually growing our business the way we do it.
[00:15:01] Jarred Morgan: We have jobs?
[00:15:02] Eric Knight: Well, that's true. We don't.
[00:15:04] Jarred Morgan: This is for leisure and fun.
[00:15:07] Eric Knight: Yeah, that's right.
[00:15:08] And then there's another thing. What about the people who don't get somebody on the hotline and they just call and call and call and call again. And then you finally talk to them and it's something like, I don't understand why I'm getting this reading on my test kit? What test kit do you recommend, Jarred?
[00:15:23] Wait a second. You called like it was a 911 emergency, and you didn't even have to have a question about what we do?
[00:15:31] Jarred Morgan: Well, I would say some of that might have to do with the fact that if you are calling, you don't know our inner workings of our business. You don't know where these calls are going. You don't know who's answering what. And honestly, that's not your problem. At the end of the day, we have resources to help you. We understand that sometimes phone calls is the easiest answer that you can get, or the fastest answer that you're looking for.
[00:15:53] Just be mindful of that. If you do call, that's fine. We're not saying don't call. But have your question ready. We're happy to help out. And if we got another call coming, we'll say, Hey, I have another call coming. Like we're not being rude. It's real.
[00:16:05] And just until the next time. I've talked to customers multiple times, year to year, honestly. One year they'll call it two or three times. The next year they'll call it two or three times.
[00:16:13] And I enjoy talking to those people because they give me an update. Those are great. But they're not 20 minute calls either.
Give us time to respond to you...and we will
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[00:16:19] Jarred Morgan: If you do call and we don't answer, just leave a voicemail, we will get back to you. That is the bottom line. In some form or fashion, you will have a response from us. And we appreciate the fact that you guys are reaching out to us, because that means we're doing something right. Or at least I think we are, there's 106 of you by now.
[00:16:36] So, yeah, maybe we'll get to 150 by the end of the year. So we'll see.
[00:16:42] I guess our math, isn't adding up with all these inbound calls and blog posts.
What a good phone call sounds like
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[00:16:46] Eric Knight: Yeah. Something's not adding up. But that's okay. Uh, let's, let's do a quick example of what a good call would be. Somebody calls the hotline. And let's say I get Jarred on the line. This is what a well thought out question would sound like.
[00:17:00] Hi, Jarred. I'm a homeowner in Oklahoma city. I'm on well water. And my pool is about 25,000 gallons. Here's my question. Do I need to use a maintenance dose of SC-1000? Because there's iron in my tap water. I see on your website that it says to purge, but it's not very clear to me if I need to use a maintenance dose every week, or if I should be good with an annual purge, what do you think?
[00:17:24] Jarred Morgan: Perfect question and my general response would be yes, maintenance dose is appropriate. But I would have a more proactive approach to pre-filtering my water as it's filling a pool up so you're not having to manage it when it gets into the body of water. And start it with the purge, moving into the maintenance and just keep up with it. That's going to be your best result at the end of the day.
[00:17:44] Eric Knight: Okay. Awesome. Thanks Jarred. Click.
[00:17:47] That is a beautiful call. We'll take those all day long. But understand when that phone rings, it completely interrupts everything else that we're trying to do. And like this, this podcast is going to take me a few hours to produce and actually publish.
[00:18:02] Jarred Morgan: Because you won't stop complaining to our audience, Eric. Stop complaining. All right.
[00:18:06] Eric Knight: Now that's valid. Okay, well, In that sense. I'm glad we got this off our chest. I feel lighter. You know, I feel maybe people will call less and reach out through the help center more, which is very helpful to us. Contact us with patience in mind.
Summary
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[00:18:22] Eric Knight: Anyway, this is episode 102. I don't know what we're going to get into in the next few episodes. We have a huge backlog. I mean, we're over 50 different ideas from listeners, which is great. They email us podcast@orendatech.com and they're asking for certain episodes, we do have a lot of ideas.
[00:18:38] The problem is we don't have a lot of time. So it's going to be scarce probably until late April because it's just nonstop for us. We hope you understand. Thanks for listening to us vent. We're not frustrated with you, we're just overwhelmed. And it's better to be overwhelmed than to not have people calling in the first place, I guess.
[00:18:56] Jarred Morgan: It's going to say better than being underwhelmed, but yeah. We appreciate you guys. We really do, and thank you for listening! We've had a bunch of people come up to us over the trade shows that we've been to and introduce themselves, and say hi, and talk about something they specifically liked hearing and that's great.
[00:19:12] Thank you for listening and have a good opening season here moving forward.
[00:19:17] Eric Knight: Yup. It's getting warmer soon. Take care everyone.