We work hard to cultivate an open line of communication between our customers, partners, and our staff.
Through the years here on our Energy Management blog, I’ve focused on some of Telkonet’s industry experts: Jason Tienor, our CEO; Jeff Sobieski, our CTO; Justin Lendowski, HVAC sales engineer, and more.
There are other industry experts at Telkonet who’ve not been brought into focus on our blog including our engineers, finance experts, project managers, project engineers, support staff, and warehouse staff. Whew!
Share Information Freely
I came to Telkonet almost 8 years ago. I was a technical writer from the mortgage banking field. There’s a lot I didn’t know. There’s a lot I still don’t know. But that’s okay because Telkonet is a special group of individuals from many walks of life, who share one thing in common: their drive to contribute to our company’s success. They share information freely.
My brother once told me that someone who freely shares his knowledge and doesn’t hoard it as if his livelihood were being threatened, is successful in part because he’s seen as a valuable fountain of knowledge: “there’s plenty more where that came from”. And it’s true.
My success as a technical writer and instructional designer hinges largely on my subject matter experts, SMEs for short (pronounced “smees”). They are generous with their time and talent, and when I’ve gathered the knowledge I need to complete a project, they really do leave me with the impression, “there’s plenty more where that came from”.
Accessibility
We want our customers and partners to engage with us and our brand. From a Telkonet employee perspective, we gain a deeper understanding of our target audience when we engage directly.
It’s not just our Support Team that engages directly. It’s soup-to-nuts engagement, from Sales all the way to post-installation Support. Our partners, our installers, our customers have direct access to many of our SMEs.
Just this week, one of our Sales reps asked one of our Project Engineers, “Can you jump on a call with my customer tomorrow? He might have some highly technical questions.” (The answer was, “Absolutely, I can.”)
Recently someone on our Sales team posted a question in our Project Engineering Slack Channel. “I’m looking for a solution…Here are the owner’s goals…Is this an ideal opportunity for…?” All of us were privy to the question AND the subsequent answers. We are all a little smarter because of it.
Knowledge Base-A Group Endeavor
A knowledge base is a self-serve online library of information about our products and services.
It includes FAQs, installation and maintenance guides, and troubleshooting tips. All of this content is thanks to our subject matter experts, freely sharing what they know. Telkonet gives high priority to our online knowledge base, a tool used by our partners and our customers. I know this because I maintain it. In fact, we’re building an even more robust knowledge base at this very moment. We look forward to rolling it out in early 2022.