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I realize some of you have unique challenges in the business world. Some of you are compelled to get toe to toe with customers on
a daily basis. Some of you find that you must hide behind Philadelphia Lawyers (now there's an oxymoron for you!) in order to
keep those bad people from weaseling out of their commitments.
The funny thing about that is that I have some plumbers that run into those same problems. Yep, I usually have one or two techs out there who always get the rotten customers. They always get the folks who want to argue. They always get the shyster who tries to get a free deal. These hapless techs of mine always get stuck with the price shoppers and complainers.
 On the other hand, I have some guys who rarely get a bad apple. These guys regularly get exuberant reports on their customer comment cards. Their sales are higher, their performance better and these guys are generally more enjoyable to be around. So, being the analytical sort that I am, I began to study this situation. First, I assumed that our CSR/Dispatch team was screening calls . . . sending all the sour grapes to a couple of guys whom they didn't like and all the Pollyanna's to a couple of favorite techs. Well, after a bit of observation, I discovered that our CSRs and Dispatchers weren't even following our simple scripts, much less executing a Freudian personality test on every incoming call so I ruled out that possibility.
Next, I assumed that in the cosmic scheme of things every business is allocated a certain number of lousy customers. I figured that they were distributed on a rotating basis so I deduced that a couple of our guys were just in the wrong position on the wheel of fortune. To fix that, I simply began intercepting dispatching assignments, giving the presumed "good customers" to the hapless techs and vice versa. Well, either the cosmic wheel of fortune out smarted me or my assumption was wrong because I still came up with the same results.
Lacking the imagination of an engineer, I couldn't think of any other plausible scheme so I finally decided the difference must be in the techs themselves. What I discovered is that indeed some of our guys had made poor career choices early in life. For whatever reason, they fell into the plumbing profession when they should have joined the Postal service. I blame high school career counselors for such tragic misguidance.
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| Randall Hilton - [Email] | [Website] |
| The views expressed in this article are those of the individual author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of MasterPlumbers.com |
