You Make the Call
After
waiting all afternoon for a scheduled appearance from a contractor
who never showed or called, I called the contractor's office. After
being put on hold for a few moments, I was told the contractor was on
the road. She would beep him to call me. Twenty minutes later he
called. He offered no explanation for missing the appointment and
only said it was too late today; he'd try to make it tomorrow. Too
bad, but I won't be here tomorrow.
He had
a cell phone and my telephone number. If he had called earlier to
inform me there would be a delay or change in plans, I could have
changed my plans too. Waiting all afternoon for a no-show used all
my time.
I was
in the service business twice, so to speak. I spent eight years as a
technician in the Air Force, where quality control insured the work
ethic, in case you didn't have one to start with.
I then worked for many
years with one of the best service organizations in the world. Not
surprisingly, our first concern was customer satisfaction. We
sent annual satisfaction surveys to all our customers) and any less
than-satisfactory response required a management visit to find out
why. Invariably, the prime complaint was lack of
communication. We worked under a two-hour
response time to our customers. A return phone call to a customer as
soon as the service call came in was one of the prime performance
appraisal items. A change in plans meant we would call the waiting
customer again. Plans change
continuously. It isn't surprising for a new part to be defective or
to discover problems deeper than first
encountered. Even accidents and weather will interfere with a service
schedule; anyone who has ever been in business will testify to this.
Most
customers understand the service environment and will work with
problems affecting service, especially if the call isn't urgent. But
if service is impaired because someone is trying to print the
payroll, that's a different matter. Customers expect the response to
a service call to reflect the urgency of their problem.
If you
get diverted by a priority call, you still need to call the customers
you have committed to and tell them there is a change in schedule. If
you can't call them all, have someone else make the calls.
Don't let customers hang.
It will ruin your business, even if you are the
only one in town today that knows how to fix whatever is broken.
Somebody will pick up the excess, and if they give better service
than you, they will take away your business.
It
takes communication to work, and in this day where everyone has a
cell phone and a pager, not calling your customer is a sign of poor,
unacceptable service. If you fail to call, you will have an irate
customer, instead of a loyal one. It is such an easy problem to fix.
George Mindling ©
1999
