The Technician

Chances are you are a service contractor owner or employee. It could be an electrical contractor or solar energy or plumbing or HVAC. It doesn't matter. You or your people enter a home or place of business and repair, replace, maintain or install whatever it is that's your specialty. You try to make a difference for your customer.

Keep that thought in mind as you watch this short film. Notice how technician Simon Oliver Fecteau tries to make a difference for his customer. Maybe it's just me, but I do believe Simon is raising the bar for us all...

McDonald's Dirty Trick

I had to catch a 6:20 a.m. flight to Orlando this morning, which meant I was in the airport around 5:30 a.m., looking for a place to grab breakfast. My choice was McDonald's or... um... well... nothing.

McDonald's was the only restaurant that was open. None of the others looked close to opening. I doubted any would open before 6:30 a.m. at the earliest, leaving McDonald's with a competition free hour.

What a dirty trick by Mickey D, staying open longer hours than the competition!

Given the length of the line in front of McDonald's, I suspect any other restaurant would peel off one third of McDonald's customers based on the line alone. The restaurant owners/managers don't even know how much business they're missing by not opening an hour or two earlier.

A lack of operating hours does not only affect airport fast food. It also impacts service contractors who do not want to stay open an hour or two later or who seek to avoid Saturday service. Like the closed fast food restaurants, they have no idea how much business they're losing.

If a homeowner loses a water heater Friday evening, calls your company and gets an answering machine, do you really think he's going to wait until you get around to calling him back sometime on Monday?

Some service contractors make a conscious decision to shut down at 5:00 p.m. and on the weekend. This is okay if the company has plenty of business during normal operating hours and can accept losing emergency service. However, contractors who complain about a lack of business while limiting hours can only blame the guy in the mirror.

Protection From the Wrong Cheeseburger

Think you have customer service issues? Try running a fast food franchise where the customer calls 911 seeking protection from the wrong cheeseburger.

When I talk about the need to fire a customer every now and then, this is the customer you should fire.

Two Cab Rides

David and I called a cab to take us from a business meeting to the hotel. At the very instant the cab pulled up, the meeting got interesting. We kept the cabbie waiting for a few minutes while we wrapped up and apologized when we loaded our luggage into the cab. The cab driver didn't seem to mind, though he did say that the dispatcher was getting itchy.

The cab ride was short. It was only a couple of miles. We were recapping the meeting for most of the trip. When we finished, the cab driver engaged us in the usual type of cab conversation. Where are you from? Why are you here?

At the hotel, the cabbie discovered that his meter hadn't reset from his last fare. It's going to be about $10, he said, but he has to get a supervisor to give him the fare amount. He worked the radio while we waited in the back seat. The supervisor wasn't readily available. The cabbie was clearly embarrassed about the wait and offered several apologies, which we brushed off.

"We made you wait," I told him. "It's okay for you to make us wait." A few minutes later, David offered the same comment.

The supervisor finally returned. The fare was $10.30. David paid $20.

The next morning we needed a cab to go from the hotel to the office. There wasn't a hotel bellman working the cab stand and we wanted a cab with a credit card terminal, so we walked down the line of cabs to find one.

The first cab with a terminal was eight cabs back. We shortened the cabbie's wait by pulling him out of line. His only comment was to grumble that we weren't going a long way.

He said it again before we got out of the parking lot.

"Yeah, you said that already," barked David in a clear signal that his tip was at risk if he continued to gripe. He did.

He griped that individual cabbies couldn't buy a medallion and that the cab drivers didn't stick together like they did in other cities.

"So move," said David.

"This is my home," snarled the cabbie.

So far, we'd travelled about a block. The cabbie commented again that we weren't going very far. He noted that there was a hotel much closer to the address we were going to and we could walk across the street from that hotel. Not quite. And with our luggage, we would've called a cab from that hotel too.

The cabbie informed us that a medallion cost $300,000 in New York and stated his belief that two people driving a cab over two shifts could each make $50,000 per year and pay it off in three years. I could be wrong, but I think he overlooked living expenses and pay for the second driver. I didn't ask about it.

He asked where we were from. David told him Dallas. He said, "Figures. You can always tell the ones from Dallas."

"What does that mean?"

"People from Dallas and Houston. They're different. You can tell."

He mumbled the rest.

Just before we arrived at our destination, the cab driver must have realized he was shooting himself in the foot. He started talking about the beauty of the sunrise and took a picture of it.

When we arrived, the total on the meter was a little less than $10. David paid the exact amount.

You couldn't ask for a different experience. The first cab driver underperformed the technical aspects of the job. He messed up the meter, which required us to wait while a supervisor gave him the fare. The final fare, based on the supervisor's estimate, was higher than the metered fare the next morning. The first cabbie overcharged us. By contrast, he second cab driver was technically perfect and accurately priced.

Yet, the first cabbie clearly outperformed the second. When tips were included, he was voluntarily given double the fare. If given a choice between walking and enduring another ride with the second cabbie, I would seriously consider walking, luggage and all, which is how some homeowners feel about home service companies.

With cabs and contracting, the distinguishing feature of the service is not the technical differences or even price. It's the interpersonal differences.

Technical proficiency is not enough. Offering a better price is not enough. Good human relationship skills are also required. Simply being a nice guy can overcome a technical miscue and allow you to charge more.

Don't Keep It a Secret

Whenever I take shirts to my cleaners, the cleaners replaces any missing or broken buttons. Your cleaners probably does the same, but do you know about it?

The reason I'm aware is the cleaners sticks a small tag through the matching button hole and staples it. The tag declares, "Replaced Button."

The tag is a reminder of a small added value the cleaners provides. Without the tag, I might forget about there was a button missing or even be aware of it. The cleaners won't get extra credit if I don't know about it. Hence, the tag.

I bet there are little things that you do for your customers they are unaware of. A plumber might clean a faucet aerator. An HVAC technician might notice the time on a digital thermostat is off an hour due to a change in daylight savings time and set the time correctly. An electrician might casually test a GFCI outlet. A pool technician might cut out a small section of pool sweep hose where it's leaking.

Whatever the action, you won't get credit if you don't tell the customer what was done. Note it on the invoice and write, "No charge." And don't just note it. Tell the customer too. Think of the impact if the cleaners employee told me that three buttons were found missing and were replaced at the time I picked up my shirts.

When you do a good deed, even if it's part of the routine, don't keep it a secret.

Mirroring to Build Rapport

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davefayram/ / CC BY 2.0

Have you ever just clicked with a prospect? Everything worked from the minute you met. It was an easy sale.

More than likely, you and the prospect share similar social styles. You have natural rapport. You click.

It's great when you benefit from automatic rapport. Too bad it only happens around one time in four. Most of the time, your social style conflicts with the prospect's.

When your style conflicts with the prospect, you don't click. Yes, you can still make a sale, but it's more difficult. In fact, when the salesperson's social style is in direct conflict with the prospect's style, the sale is made in spite of, not because of the salesperson's efforts.

So what can you do? Well, one simple technique is mirroring. Match the prospect's verbal tone and pacing. Match the body language. If the prospect leans back, you lean back and vice versa.

Be careful not to mirror so closely that you mimic the prospect. If noticed, mimicking can be perceived as an insult.

Frankly, it's uncomfortable to mirror a prospect. It's counter to your natural social style, but it improves your focus on the prospect and helps the prospect become more comfortable. Give it a try.

Effective Communication

This is a well-done slide presentation on effective communication IF you are already well versed in the subject matter. It would make a good presentation to download and use in a company training meeting.

Download as a PDF.

You Can't Send a Duck To Eagle School

The world's greatest mechanic, if he's gruff, rough, and rude, is unfit to work in residential service.

How's Your Beside Manner?

In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the differences between doctors who get sued for malpractice with those who are not sued. Following is an excerpt from the book:

Believe it or not, the risk of being sued for malpractice has very little to do with how many mistakes a doctor makes. Analyses of malpractice lawsuits show that there are highly skilled doctors who get sued a lot and doctors who make lots of mistakes and never get sued. At the same time, the overwhelming number of people who suffer an injury due to the negligence of a doctor never file a malpractice suit at all. In other words, patients don't file lawsuits because they've been harmed by shoddy medical care. Patients file lawsuits because they've been harmed by shoddy medical care and something else happens to them.

What is that something else? It's how they were treated, on a personal level, by their doctor. What comes up again and again in malpractice cases is that patients say they were rushed or ignored or treated poorly. "People just don't sue doctors they like," is how Alice Burkin, a leading medical malpractice lawyer, puts it. "In all the years I've been in this business, I've never had a potential client walk in and say, 'I really like this doctor, and I feel terrible about doing it, but I want to sue him.' We've had people come in saying they want to sue some specialist, and we'll say, 'We don't think that doctor was negligent. We think it's your primary care doctor who was at fault.' And the client will say, 'I don't care what she did. I love her, and I'm not suing her.'"

Burkin once had a client who had a breast tumor that wasn't spotted until it had metastasized, and she wanted to sue her internist for the delayed diagnosis. In fact, it was her radiologist who was potentially at fault. But the client was adamant. She wanted to sue the internist. "In our first meeting, she told me she hated this doctor because she never took the time to talk to her and never asked about her other symptoms," Burkin said. "'She never looked at me as a whole person,' the patient told us.. .. When a patient has a bad medical result, the doctor has to take the time to explain what happened, and to answer the patient's questions—to treat him like a human being. The doctors who don't are the ones who get sued." It isn't necessary, then, to know much about how a surgeon operates in order to know his likelihood of being sued. What you need to understand is the relationship between that doctor and his patients.

Recently the medical researcher Wendy Levinson recorded hundreds of conversations between a group of physicians and their patients. Roughly half of the doctors had never been sued. The other half had been sued at least twice, and Levinson found that just on the basis of those conversations, she could find clear differences between the two groups. The surgeons who had never been sued spent more than three minutes longer with each patient than those who had been sued did (18.3 minutes versus 15 minutes). They were more likely to make "orienting" comments, such as "First I'll examine you, and then we will talk the problem over" or "I will leave time for your questions"—which help patients get a sense of what the visit is supposed to accomplish and when they ought to ask questions. They were more likely to engage in active listening, saying such things as "Go on, tell me more about that," and they were far more likely to laugh and be funny during the visit. Interestingly, there was no difference in the amount or quality of information they gave their patients; they didn't provide more details about medication or the patient's condition. The difference was entirely in how they talked to their patients.

It's possible, in fact, to take this analysis even further. The psychologist Nalini Ambady listened to Levinson's tapes, zeroing in on the conversations that had been recorded between just surgeons and their patients. For each surgeon, she picked two patient conversations. Then, from each conversation, she selected two ten-second clips of the doctor talking, so her slice was a total of forty seconds. Finally, she "content-filtered" the slices, which means she removed the high-frequency sounds from speech that enable us to recognize individual words. What's left after content-filtering is a kind of garble that preserves intonation, pitch, and rhythm but erases content. Using that slice—and that slice alone—Ambady did a Gottman-style analysis. She had judges rate the slices of garble for such qualities as warmth, hostility, dominance, and anxiousness, and she found that by using only those ratings, she could predict which surgeons got sued and which ones didn't.

Ambady says that she and her colleagues were "totally stunned by the results," and it's not hard to understand why. The judges knew nothing about the skill level of the surgeons. They didn't know how experienced they were, what kind of training they had, or what kind of procedures they tended to do. They didn't even know what the doctors were saying to their patients. All they were using for their prediction was their analysis of the surgeon's tone of voice. In fact, it was even more basic than that: if the surgeon's voice was judged to sound dominant, the surgeon tended to be in the sued group. If the voice sounded less dominant and more concerned, the surgeon tended to be in the non-sued group. Could there be a thinner slice? Malpractice sounds like one of those infinitely complicated and multidimensional problems. But in the end it comes down to a matter of respect, and the simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice, and the most corrosive tone of voice that a doctor can assume is a dominant tone. Did Ambady need to sample the entire history of a patient and doctor to pick up on that tone? No, because a medical consultation is a lot like one of Gottman's conflict discussions or a student's dorm room. It's one of those situations where the signature comes through loud and clear.

Re-read the passage above and switch the term, doctor, with technician or plumber or carpet cleaner or electrician or any other term you use for field service. Change malpractice with complaints to friends and neighbors, to the state contractor licensing board, to the district attorney, or to the state attorney general, or poor ratings on Google or Yelp.

The implication is that you can reduce complaints about your field service personnel by...

• Slowing down (and not even slowing down much).
  
  
• Removing anxiety by informing customers what you will do in advance, pre-framing the call (e.g., "First, relax. While I need to troubleshoot, I'm sure this isn't anything we haven't handled before. I'll get you taken care of. Here's how I'm going to proceed. I'm going take a look at the problem you reported to make sure it's the real problem and not a symptom of something else. This is likely going to require me to check this location and that location. When I finish, I'll report my findings to you and answer any questions. After you're satisfied with the work to be performed and authorize me to proceed, I'm going to make the necessary repairs, collect payment, and be on my way and out of your hair. Does this sound acceptable to you?")
  
  
• Listening to the customer with empathy and encouraging the customer to share information.
  
  
• Assuming an attitude and a posture of service (i.e., lose all defensive arrogance).

In health care and home care, good technical skills are not enough. They must be complmented by good interpersonal skills. In fact, patients and customers will forgive and explain away technical screw ups when the interpersonal skills are strong. There is little forgiveness when the interpersonal skills are lacking.

Every service call has two components. One is the problem that must be repaired. The second is the customer who must be attended to and reassured. With doctors, we call this "beside manner."

How's yours?

Subject to Change

This is a nice presentation that will help you to think about your business and offerings from a customer perspective.

Can You Afford To Be Generous?

Photo: powerbooktrance
On the drive to work, I swung by Starbucks. I stop by this particular Starbucks fairly often, but not enough for me to recognize any of their employees. The only clue to the amount of money Starbucks sucks out of me was my use of a Starbucks logoed mug, which was a gift.

I asked for the bold coffee. The barista rang up the order and took my mug to rince it out. She returned to sadly inform me that the bold wasn't ready. It would take another three minutes. Or, she offered, I could have Pike Place now.

In truth, three minutes is no big deal. I can pull out my phone and easily spend ten times that about amusing myself with Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, email, or one of the blogs I follow. Shoot, in a normal restaurant it takes a multiple of three minutes to catch the wait staff's attention (though servers always seem to be Johnny-on-the-spot when I don't want anything).

But I didn't want to wait three minutes this morning. I smiled and said, "Oh, just give me the Pike Place."

She cheerfully filled my mug and when I started to pay, refused to accept it. She said, "This one's on us."

A free cup of coffee isn't like winning the lottery, but it still felt good. A McDonald's is located about a quarter mile away. I doubt McDonald's would give me a free cup of coffee, though McDonald's promises coffee for less.

Photo: Robert Couse-Baker

Honestly, the margin in coffee is high enough that McDonald's has plenty of room to give a cup away now and then, but I doubt management looks at it that way. I suspect they think they're offering a generous price and nothing more is needed. At least, that's what their marketing suggests.

By charging more, Starbucks has more room to be more generous. Even though I pay higher prices at Starbucks, I feel like I'm treated better. Starbucks seems friendlier and more caring.

Coffee's not the same as in-home service, but it's still part of the service industry. Scale the principle and it can work for your company.

Do you charge enough that you can afford to make a generous gesture from time to time?

Johnny The Bagger

This is a great video for a Monday morning. It shows how everyone can make a difference. It shows how an attitude of service can permeate an organization. Just as one person can poison an organization, one person can inspire those around him.

CSR Loses It

Need some laughs on a Friday? Watch this short video of a call taker who is almost certainly on commission, under performing, and over caffinated. I hope you don't have anyone like this working in your company...

Mabel & The Wal-Mart Greeter

I love the local Kroger. It's close enough to walk to, though I always drive. It's got great produce, dozens of cheeses, an olive bar, hard to find food from around the world, a decent selection of meat, poultry, fish, shellfish, bread, beer, and wine. The prices are competitive. The staff is mostly high school kids who are invariably pleasant, energetic, and helpful. Except for Mabel (not her real name).

Mabel strikes me as... bitter. While the kids are kids, Mable is either older than I am or has lived a really hard life so that she appears older than I am. Maybe she resents having to work in a store with kids young enough to call her grandma. Who knows the reason. Or cares.

The point is that in a store with great service and helpful people, Mabel is the opposite. Where the kids call someone for a price check or give the customer the benefit of the doubt, Mabel doubts the customer, even for trivial amounts. While the kids apologize for the imposition of asking for an ID when the customer writes a check, Mabel treats the mere fact that customers want to write a check as an imposition.

As a shopper, Mabel makes you feel bad for shopping at Kroger and bothering her. She shows her irritation with a sneer, curl of the lip, exasperated sigh, and more. Worse than the attitude she shows customers is the potential that her attitude might infect the kids.

Mabel is poison. If left in place, sooner or later she will poison someone else. Then the disease will spread and the store will suffer.

The competition is waiting. Two miles to the east and two miles to the west are Tom Thumb stores, Kroger's top local competitors. Both stores have upgraded after the Kroger opened. Two miles to the north is a Sprouts, with better quality food, though less selection.

The perfect contrast is the Wal-Mart on the other side of town. The great Stubie Doak relayed his experience buying groceries at Wal-Mart.

Upon entering the store, Stubie grabbed a shopping cart.

"I was saving that cart just for you," exclaimed the Wal-Mart greeter with a smile.

"Well thank you," replied Stubie. "It's perfect."

Stubie said the greeter extended his hand. Stubie shook it and the greeter said, "I bet you're the type of person who never has a bad day."

Stubie said he felt great the rest of the day. In fact, he considered asking the greeter if he would adopt him.

Do you have any Mabels or Wal-Mart greeters on your team? Each affects those around them. Each affects the desire of your customers to do business with you again.

Telephone Customer Service Fundamentals

This is a great presentation to review with your CSRs and dispatchers on customer service over the phone. The only beef I have is the admonition to avoid ever telling the customer, "I don't know."

It's okay to say, "I don't know," as long as it's followed by, "But I'll find out."

Watch the presentation in full screen...

Would You Rather Call a Strange Plumber or Visit a Strange Mosque?

I saw this whine by Jenny Allen and found some truth in it...

Our house is an old farmhouse, and it has three bedrooms and two bathrooms, except the shower in the upstairs bathroom doesn't work. The shower per se works, but if you use it water streams from the ceiling down below into the living room, and then you have to stick a bucket underneath to catch the water. It's like living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, only with much lower property values. So please limit yourselves to the downstairs
shower. Thanks!

Speaking of the downstairs bathroom, sometimes the toilet doesn't flush. That's because that piece of wire that connects the bulb thing inside the tank to the rod thing sometimes comes unhinged. The wire is actually a replacement for the real piece of hardware; in fact, it's a bit of coat hanger wire that our friend Augusta rigged up when the toilet broke years ago. She got tired of waiting for our plumber, who promised to come and fix it but never did. Just lift the tank and hook it up again.

Try not to call our plumber unless it's an emergency. I'm afraid of our plumber, who barks at me, but plumbers call all the shots here. You do not want to rankle your plumber, because the other plumbers are all tied up, and then you won't have any plumber. Our plumber has been coming to our house longer than I have, which is twenty-six years, and he seems to think I am some kind of interloper, a Janey-come-lately.

"Jeff," I said on the phone when I asked him to come and turn the water on this spring, "I've known you for twenty-six years, and I'd like to ask you a favor."

"Depends what it is."

"I always call you by your name, and you never call me by my name, and I wonder if you could call me by my name."

"I know yah name!"

"Well, thank you for turning the water on," I said.

"All right," he said, and hung up.

Jeff's phone number is on the attached list of other repair and service people, who will not bark at you but will probably not come. They are too busy in August to come. Whatever the problem, you'll have better luck just fixing it yourself.

"I'm afraid of our plumber, who barks at me," writes Allen.

"Whatever the problem, you'll have better luck just fixing it yourself," she adds.

Wow. Is there any more damning criticism of the state of service companies than that? I think a large segment of the DIY market exists not out of consumer cheapness, but that consumers perceive it's simply easier to fix it yourself.

Calling a contractor, for most people, is unsettling. It's filled with uncertainty and unknown.

• Will you get a responsive company that will treat you well?
  
  
• Will the serviceperson be pleasant or gruff, treating you like an idiot?
  
  
• What kind of person will show up? Will he or she be honest?
  
  
• How long will it take to get someone to show up?
  
  
• Will someone arrive when promised or will you wait and wait and wait?
  
  
• Will the work take days to complete?
  
  
• Will it be done right the first time, or will you have to call the company back again and again?
  
  
• Will the serviceperson make a mess and not clean up?
  
  
• Will you get ripped off?
  
  
• Will you know what the costs are before the work begins or will you get an unpleasant surprise?
  
  
• Will there be an unpleasant conflict?

These are some of the questions that cross consumers' minds. Your marketing should address these issues. You should address them on your website, in your yellow pages ads, and in your direct marketing.

Finding a new service company is unpleasant and unsettling. To give you a sense of the discomfort, imagine walking into a church, temple, or mosque during services for the first time. That feeling of unease is similar to the consumer's feeling of unease when calling you.

Now, imagine a friend recommends his or her church/temple/mosque. The friend tells you what to expect, how to act, and what to wear. You might still approach the service with trepidation, but you would feel much better about. Your friend's attended and survived. You can too.

It's similar when a friend recommends a service company. This is why people turn to friends and neighbors first when looking for companies. This is why referral marketing, affinity marketing, and social media are so important for service companies.

Let's say you know the pastor/rabbi/imam from a civic club. You mention something about he pastor/rabbi/imam about attending a service and receive a warm welcome and personal invitation. You feel much better about attendance.

Similarly, people who know you personally, as the owner of a company, are going to feel far more at ease calling your company for service. This is why it's so important to get involved in civic clubs, networking groups, the chamber of commerce, and more. The more people you know, the more opportunities you will create. And to make sure everyone knows what you do, always wear logoed shirts.

And when you are fortunate enough to be invited into someone's home, act like a guest. Be polite. Be friendly. Be helpful.

It's hard to imagine a worse example of service than Jenny Allen's plumber, Jeff. The guy's been serving her home for more than a quarter century and the upstairs shower is unusable. The toilet downstairs doesn't flush and was jury-rigged years ago.

What do you bet Jeff is the type of tradesperson who sips coffee at the supply house, complaining about his customers, griping about DIY, moaning about how cheap people are, and lamenting his lack of business.

(c) 2009 Matt Michel

Rosenthal Plumbing Customer Service Rap

Rosenthal Plumbing put together a rap video to illustrate customer service principles...