SMRT Systems: The Advantage That Is Hard to Copy

"Every system claims to do the same things, and an hour with a sales person rarely tells an owner which one is actually better."
Shopping for dry cleaning software is harder than it looks. Everysystem claims to do the same things, and an hour with a salespersonrarely tells an owner which one is actually better. Any company canadd a feature, and any company can drop its price. What is much harder to copy is a reputation for picking up the phone. 
SMRT Systems, which builds software for dry cleaners, has arranged much of its business around that idea. The company started from the counter rather than the office. Its founder took over a struggling San Francisco dry cleaner, could not find software that handled what the shop actually needed, and built his own. The thinking has not changed much since: the best thing a software company in this trade can have is customers who are glad they signed, so the job is not really to sell systems but to help cleaners run better shops. Day today, that comes down to plain habits. Answer the phone. Tell an ownerthe truth when something is broken. Own mistakes. Follow through. Stay with a mess until it is cleaned up. Finish what was started. 
It shows up first in the setup. A cleaner can have SMRT staffcome out and work in the shop, or do the whole thing remotely forless money, which covers the same setup and the same training ona schedule that works around production. Either way, moving theinformation over is SMRT's job, not the owner's. The company takes what is in the old system and loads in the price list, the customer list and the employee records, so nobody is rebuilding a business foreman empty screen during an already rough week. 
The rest of the training waits, and that is on purpose. Learning toadd items, change prices or set up a new employee does not happenduring go-live week. It comes later, once the pressure is off andpeople can actually take it in. That part is handled by the personmanaging the account or by the support team. The idea is an owner who can make changes without calling a vendor first, and who was never asked to learn all of it at once. 
Support runs on the hours cleaners work, with people in North Carolina, California, Sweden and Australia. Recent work has goneinto cutting steps out of a support call. Staff can now get onto a work station directly while they have the owner on the line, and the owner approves every time. 
The company is bringing in AI the same careful way, on the belief that saving time is only worth it if no customer ends up ignored. A computer assistant handles quick, common questions in the chat window at any hour, and SMRT's own people use similar tools to get to the bottom of technical problems faster. Both are there to get an owner to a real person sooner, not to keep him away from one. Cleaners know the difference between a ticket being closed and a problem being solved. 
A lot of what SMRT builds starts in those calls. Any employee can now look back through scanning history to track down a missing order. That came from an owner who explained that only the top-levellogin could pull that report, so his people stood around waiting onhim while a customer waited on all of them. Notes now stay with an order when it gets split up in detailing, after cleaners pointed out that what a customer asked for at pickup was not making it to the back.Both requests came in through support and setup staff, who put them on the build list themselves. Underneath all of it is a simple idea about where new business comes from. Every email, every phone call, every support ticketand every conversation counts, because trust builds on itself. Goodexperiences make an owner confident, confidence makes him loyal, and a loyal owner is the one who tells another cleaner that a company did exactly what it said it would.