Jaftex Customer Service Update

Did I ever tell you that the Jaftex Companies can be a little complicated at times? When I say, “Complicated,” I am talking about how the companies differ and how that makes the processes amongst them more fragmented and less streamlined. Aside from the fact that things are complicated due to the various permutations of ownership among my family members across each of the companies, they are also made complicated because a lot of the things we do are based on how things were done at that company before we purchased them.

In other words, when we purchased companies over the years (FYI, all the Jaftex companies were purchased i.e. we started none on our own), we tried to avoid disrupting the processes and policies that were in place already. Unfortunately, as time went on, this left us with lots of conflicting policies as we purchased more companies. It became hard to keep track of all the varying policies.

For example, prior to us buying FreeSpirit in 2018, all of our customer service and order entry was handled in the New York office and policies were handled fairly uniformly across the New York brands. Then in 2018 when we purchased FreeSpirit, we acquired a new customer service team specifically for that company. They had several policies that clashed with the policies of the New York Companies.

Fast forward to today and we are now looking to streamline more of the business and remove a lot of these unnecessary variances. We just need things to be more simple. As they used to say in law school, “KISS: keep it simple, so simple that it is stupid.” I think that is a good theory when it comes to corporate policies and that is the direction we are moving in.

With that, we just started to make the transition to have all order entry and customer service handled by the FreeSpirit customer service team which is located in Greenville, South Carolina. This will serve a few important purposes to the benefit of our customers and for the benefit of the company:

• Customers will have one person to answer all their questions which will result in one-stop shopping.
• This will save our customers time if they only have contact.
• This will serve to avoid duplication of efforts and wasting time by multiple customer service reps handling the same customer.
• Actions by the customer service team will be consistent across the companies. In fact, we are revising our policies prior to our July release so that we can get our policies aligned for things like minimum orders, requirements to open an account, payment terms, etc. Simplification is key.

If you are a customer of any of the Jaftex companies, you should make sure to find out who your customer service rep (CSR) is if the time comes that need their help. Our CSRs each have a dedicated territory that they each handle. We currently have close to 10 CSRs with lots of combined years of experience.

As soon as we get through the transition of having the New York team out of all customer service issues, we will probably make more formal introductions of the CSRs which will hopefully contain photos so we can all put a face with a name. In addition, we will work towards getting all of our CSRs @jaftex.com email addresses instead of the @freespiritfabrics.com. In the meantime, you can also always call our customer service manager Barbara Freeland at 866-907-3305 x533 with any questions or concerns you have. In addition, you can always contact me at scott@jaftex.com with any of these inquiries too as I am glad to send you in the right direction.

Outside of all that, you should know that this is just the beginning of the Jaftex companies working towards uncomplicating the business. Stay tuned for a more simplified Jaftex!