Tileworks of Texas: Helping Everyone

Tileworks of Texas is a local natural stone company that provides high-end ceramic, glass, porcelain and natural stone floor tiles as well as wood flooring and natural stone countertops at wholesale, builder and retail sales levels. TWT has a beautiful showroom in central Austin and welcomes builders, contractors, remodelers and the public alike to utilize its friendly inside sales staff and plan their interior design projects. Whether you are envisioning your dream home or a small-scale miracle like a remodel of a child's bathroom, it is a wonderful place to spread out your cabinet samples and paint swatches and create.

Helping the Individual

A local business that has a variety of clients has to be cautious how it sells and who it sells to. In Tilework's case, the builders and contractors and retail clients all have different customer service needs and different questions - even different product price points - but they often times all work together on a given project. This is easy enough when working face-to-face in Tilework's beautiful showroom, but what about the client who hasn't met with a salesperson yet, a client who just started shopping or a client who is out of town? It makes the most sense to try to help everyone at the same time before they enter the showroom - at least on a basic level. But how?

Helpful online content is a great opportunity to help a range of clients all at once on a basic, introductory level without asking them first to make a trip to the brick-and-mortar to meet with someone. TWT's showroom and staff are phenomenal at educating its clients when they are in the showroom, but the company has also made a great start toward educating its clients on its web site.

An Online Showroom: Meet Everyone's Needs from the Start

As of June 24, 2009, TWT has an online Design Center that allows visitors to design their countertops, review specs on various natural stones and more. There is a form to request an estimate and clear color pictures of a variety of stones.

And Tileworks can take its online showroom even further. As it stands, Tilework's web site is a clean, useful empty room. Unlike its bustling, bright showroom, what is missing is human insight.

While the site is interactive on a basic level, which has been established is needed, it does not provide the additional, truly helpful insight that TWT's staff can offer. Adding a blog with three or four guest writers - a sales person, a granite fabricator and maybe a the purchasing agent - would add a level of human helpfulness to the site that is not already there.

• The Sales Person: Write about a new design they collaborated on, a product that is being discontinued or FAQs most often covered in the showroom. These topics will be helpful to all potential clients - from retail to builder.
• The Granite Fabricator: Blog about how the fabrication plant is running or new and interesting tools or methods of working they are experimenting with. Such information would be of interest to remodelers and contractors and builders - people who are more familiar with the technical aspects of countertop installation.
• The Purchasing Agent: Provide regular input about the quality of a given stone at a particular time, since their is so much variance in it, or new patterns or materials that are becoming popular. The purchasing agent's contribution would be useful to anyone who is purchasing a natural stone to an interior designer looking for the next hottest look.

Each blog post should be useful, relevant and interesting, of course, and its goal should be to add to the features already on the site, linking through to stones and stone care products, other blog articles and so on. Each article should be like a conversation with a knowledgeable sales person or expert fabricator.

The Empty Showroom vs. the Hub

Go to TWT's site, look at it, sample cabinet colors and bullnose edges and granite tiles. Do it until you are tired and then imagine it with a blog, full of helpfulness and insight for everyone.

After an experience like that - having access to so much information, learning about the design process, playing with the product and hearing people's opinions about designs and more - do you think prospective clients would be familiar enough with the topic of tile, stone, counter tops and TWT that a sales person could answer any question that might come up in the physical showroom and easily make a sale?

I don't think a prospective client would question where to go for their next home improvement project. A client's next step would be to go buy tile at TWT.