Water Treatment News

Greetings and I hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving!

Speaking of Thanksgiving, yet another holiday with record numbers of orders! Everything will be shipping on time. Any order that came in over the weekend will go out on Monday of course. Thanksgiving day orders will be a day behind as stated on the web site. While Water Value has a great system for processing orders during the holidays, we cannot do much about the shipping companies. After all, everyone is entitled to a day off once in a while, right?

Even though there were more orders on Thanksgiving and the following Friday than last year at this time (as was expected) they were processed in record time most likely due to the fact that our telephone support was shut down for the holiday. It never ceases to amaze, the amount of time that phone consumes. All email messages, queries and even quotes were answered promptly. While I can certainly understand and appreciate the necessity of telephone support, it sure does seem to drive up the over-head costs of doing business over the web. Food for thought.

On Friday a method was developed that should be in place Monday afternoon which will weed out all of the spam emails we’ve been getting, thus decreasing our response times. As of Friday morning, we were receiving more than 340 spam emails in a 24 hour period. Just deleting that many messages takes a lot of time, so the efforts to be put forth on Monday should pay off promptly. This will only increase our prompt service to our customers.!

It looks like we will be able to add FedEx as a shipper for some of our products starting this week. UPS Ground has been our shipping service for over 3 years exclusively but we now have the option to use FedEx Home delivery on certain orders.

What’s nice about having this option is the fact that FedEx will deliver on Saturday without the extra cost that UPS Ground charges. While Saturday delivery is not anticipated as a desireable feature to offer our customers, most deliveries are sent to business or work addresses, it will take one day off of orders placed late in the week. For example, if a customer in North Carolina orders a UV filter from us on Friday, they would not receive delivery until Tuesday the next week, but with Saturday considered a shipping day with FedEx, that same order would arrive on Monday instead.

For the time being, we can only use the FedEx service from our Akron Ohio facility, but in time we expect to be able to use them here in Ada Michigan and Phoenix Arizona as well.

What a great day we had today! Our voice mail system filled up twice yesterday though; my apologies to anyone that was affected. But today we did not miss a single call or email. All orders have shipped on time, all emails have been answered, all water tests are complete and results sent out, all of the phone messages are caught up, and that demonstration video is finally on-line.

That’s what we’ve been posting about the last couple of weeks. We have a demonstration video for one of our reverse osmosis products available for viewing on-line. The narrative voice-over is a bit on the quiet side but it’s still informative. We plan on producing one of these videos for each of the products we carry on the web site. The purpose of these videos is to educate shoppers on the products they are buying thus cutting down on telephone question and answer time which should lead directly to a drop in over-head costs. If our costs drop, so will the costs of our products. In the end, this is a win-win situation for everyone.

So please let us know what you think by either posting here or emailing us from the web site.

It was a slow phone day today at WaterValue.com even though I ended up missing 3 of them which prompts me to write this post:

Three times today I would call a number left on the voice mail and it would be the wrong number. Either the message caller rattled off the number so fast nobody could figure out exactly what it was, or they called from a cell phone and a fraction of it was cut out because of too much static. We have a brand new digital voice mail system here and it’s clear as a bell. I know because I spend all day talking on it or listening to it. It’s frustrating to miss a call because of those reasons. So please leave your number twice. You can leave a long message if you’d like but please say your number twice if you are calling from a cell phone.

I had a very good call today from a gentleman considering a reverse osmosis purchase. He asked some very good questions the answers to which we did not even cover in training so I’m now persuaded to study up on our systems in more depth. But one of the questions he asked was “which one is the best?” I still have no answer for that one. If we thought any of the RO systems we carried was inferior in any way, we would stop selling them.

The new demonstration project we have been working on for several weeks now is in the final stages of completion. I have gone over what we have so far and it’s turning out better than I had hoped. Keep checking back for more updates.

The new HM Digital TDS-EZ meters came in today. We have tested and verified these devices and I’m very excited about them. They are just the thing for our customer base. It’s much more sturdy than any of the other TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) meters I’ve ever tried and it even has a handly color-coded scale on the reverse side to tell you how to interpret the result. Be sure and check them out.

Hope you all have a good weekend and my sincere thanks to everyone I spoke with this last week. See you soon.

Very busy day today! My thanks go out to all who ordered from us. Everything has shipped on time.

There will be a new feature at WaterValue.com in the next few days, so be sure and look for it. I can’t give away too much but I can tell you that this feature will ensure that our customers will be the best informed water treatment equipment buyers on the web. Nobody else is doing this and I expect our competitors will follow just as soon as they can. While producing this feature is expensive, it will pay for itself in the long run because of the impact it will have on shoppers. Our customers will make their purchases knowing exactly everything about the product they select. And selecting the correct product in this business is everything. There are dozens of drinking water problems out there and nearly just as many ways of treating them properly. There will be no doubt in our customer’s minds as to the proper treatment method(s) for their needs. This service will pay for itself in less phone call and email time, which is what we spend most of our time doing. If we can cut down on that time and expense, we can significantly lower our already low prices.

I’m looking forward to hearing what you all think of this new feature. Keep checking back here in the next couple of days and I’ll post the details just as soon as we can release them.