Rapidset Buildings Customer Service

by Larry Stevens

Rapidset Buildings Customer Service

A company’s customer service record is a core consideration when making any buying decision. Especially when buying a pre-engineered building. Each metal building should be designed and built to order to ensure custumer satisfaction. Nowadays the building department scrutinizes each detail of a design before granting their approval.

A metal Building that makes for a community gathering place

Rapidset Buildings started life from SteelBuildingSupplier.com Inc., which was born out of a commercial construction company, Plumbline Commercial Builders. Created by three general contractors, Plumbline handled a lot of the major contracts around Colorado Springs. However, with Plumbline’s rapid growth, managing the company became increasingly difficult. Plumbline erected pre-engineered buildings and found it was quick, easy, and required fewer trades to manage than conventional commercial building. From there, Plumbline acquired a steel building dealership. Our first purchase was Butler, then Whirlwind, the NCI and some others.  

We discovered, however, that success is dictated by two things. The first was a price point that we were unable to hit as a Butler dealer or being a broker of a factory.  The second was customer service, which was difficult to handle along with managing a successful commercial construction company. So we needed to devise a better solution.

The answer we found was to design, detail, and engineer our own brand “Rapidset Metal Buildings”. So, we purchased MBS (Metal Building Software), the same software that steel factories use, to design and detail our buildings.  Dealers and resellers often have a “dealer version” of MBS for quoting jobs supplied by factories in their offices, but we needed to design and detail all the way down to the shop drawings so we could eliminate the trouble we had when working with other manufacturing companies. And generate and contorl the plans

When we first purchased MBS the configuration was a nightmare. We joked about anchor bolts hanging out of the roof. We began logging each customer service issue and used it to refine MBS and our internal processes.  

There are thousands of settings within MBS to dictate how the factory manufactures a building. Sometimes we change a setting and it never happens again; sometimes it is a detail check; sometimes it is a change to our assembly manual.  

The result is an increasingly cleaner building for our customers.  

After about 20 years of refining, the large amount of our buildings no longer need adjustments through detailing and engineering, they are what is called "pass through" meaning they do not need adjustment to be engineered correctly.  Today we can design buildings in minutes, including the software input for some of the manufacturing machines on the shop floor.

At Rapidset Buildings we felt that we could better manage customer service, as well as designing and engineering metal buildings more effectively, than we could a construction company. So today we are only Rapidset Buildings and it’s a pleasure to continue to refine our process.

Choosing a specific market has also vastly improved our customer service. We focus primarily on Builders, Erectors, and Resellers, although buying a building does not require a dealership or license. Today most of the buildings sold do not generate a single customer service call.

When customer service is needed we first discern the source of the error.  Because our buildings are completely engineered in-house, we pull up the shop drawings and ship list from the server. Or we can pull the job folder to ensure the factory manufactured to our specifications and that our design does not require further attention. From there we devise a solution using the MBMA manual. If the time comes that you need customer service, you’ll work with a single person in our office to reach a solution.

We at Rapidset Buildings understand that a happy client is a returning client. Our clients are based around the world which has given us a chance to travel, often just to make sure shipping, delivery, and construction goes smoothly. Our clients return to us for all of their buildings because they know that Rapidset Metal Buildings provides an unparalleled product and unsurpassed customer service.

We do refer work, but experience has taught us to work mostly from established relationships. If Rapidset Metal Buildings refers a client to you this means that you’ve purchased a number of buildings from us, that you know our system, and we’re confident in you as a builder, erector, or reseller. Working by this philosophy has greatly reduced the number of calls from buyers who are dissatisfied with their builder.

This is why we say, “Come for the price, stay for the service.”