QUESTION:  I want to lose customers and experience poor results from my marketing efforts.  What can I do?

OK, no one really asked this question but looking at some of the things we see on a regular basis it might appear that many contractors are actually trying to lose customers and achieve poor results from their marketing. 

I’m going to give a few examples of things I’ve seen just in the last few weeks.  If you want to achieve good marketing results the first step is to be honest with yourself and realize that things like these examples probably go on in your business whether you see them or not.  Secondly you should work just work like crazy to minimize the occurrence of these things within your business through training and systems. 

FACT:  Repeat service business is one of the best things a contractor can have for margins and cash flow.

FACT:  Technicians are taught how to fix things – they are not taught the nuances of sales or customer service.

FACT:  Few companies that engage in service spend an appropriate amount of time training their technicians in these nuances.

STORY #1:  A marketing campaign drove a new customer to call and request some electrical service work to install a new ceiling fan.  The service technician did a great job on the installation and as he was leaving the customer asked him about his disposal not working.  The technician as he was getting into his van simply replied that “It’s probably just the circuit breaker – you can easily flip it back on yourself.” 

The service technician should have taken the extra ten minutes to look at this with the customer and build a deeper relationship. 

Luckily this story ended well – the customer had enough respect to call the owner of the company and tell him what happened.  The owner went out to meet with the customer and in looking at the panel found some additional problems and was able to sell a service upgrade as well as landing some future remodel work. 

• How many of your technicians would do something similar in a hurry to either beat traffic or get to the next call? 

• Do you do formal training with your technicians about how to truly service a customer?

STORY #2:  I saw a friend this weekend who owns a physical therapy business.  The center of the business is two treatment rooms with identical equipment in them that requires some plumbing connections. 

One of the valves started to fail and was making some noise – but the equipment was still functional.  She called a plumber on a Friday and told them the problem and that she needed to have that room working by Saturday. 

The plumbing company had been doing work for her for a long time so she left the plumber to work on the rooms when she left on Friday afternoon. 

Saturday morning she came in to find that the plumber had taken apart the functioning room to rob parts to “fix” the other room leaving a message saying that he had to order the part that was making the noise. 

This technician did technically do what he was asked to do which was to “fix” that room but missed the bigger picture of what the client really needed to run her business.  He essentially cut her revenue in half by disabling one of the rooms and hurt her relationships with her customers as she had to reschedule them. 

This story did not end well for the contractor – by Saturday afternoon she had a new plumbing contractor and my guess is that she won’t be paying the bill for the first contractor anytime in the near future. 

Don’t let things like this happen to you and damage your relationships with new and existing customers. 

• Use stories like this to talk to your technicians and managers

• Develop your own “Lessons Learned” book of customer service wins and losses

• Have a “Best & Worst” discussion each week about the prior week’s performance

Think that these things only happen with service work?  I just didn’t have the space in this post to get into the things that people do to harm relationships with customers on projects. 

Got any of your own customer service stories good and bad that you’d like to contribute? 

As always if there are any questions you’d like to see answered on this blog please don’t hesitate to post them under comments or email us directly at:  david@dbrownmanagement.com