The Role of the Owner

Dear Jayme,

I do HVAC service work, and one of my techs gets more bad feedback on his attitude than any of the others. The problem is, he’s also the best tech I have. What should I do?

Roger

Dear Roger,

When you were out there turning the wrench yourself, it may have seemed like being a technical wizard was all that mattered. Field people certainly must be technical experts, but as a business owner, your job is to maximize the business’s overall performance, and that means a lot more than just getting the heat fixed.

Let’s make some assumptions:

• You’d like to keep your existing customers and add new ones.
• Keeping customers requires leaving them with a feeling of being well-served.

Agreed so far? Okay.

The place where contractors often get tripped up is in the definition of “well-served.” “Well-served” goes far beyond installing a new compressor. Turn the situation around. When you’re the customer, what makes you feel good about your experience? What impresses you? What makes you think positively of a company and sends you back to them? Usually the list is pretty short:

• The product or service is as advertised and delivered in the most effective way.
• There are no surprises except perhaps pleasant ones. (“We didn’t have the standard grade part you wanted, but here’s the heavy-duty part for the same price.”)
• You receive excellent value for the money. (Value, not price.)
• The employees are pleasant. (Think about the best waiter you’ve ever had. How would your customers feel if they were treated the way he treated you? Sound silly? It’s not. Your business is no different, you just sell something other than food.)

Of all these things, only the first is dependent on excellent technical skills. Yes, the customer may recognize your expertise (the heat was out, now it’s not), but he won’t realize how cleverly you diagnosed the problem or how beautifully you routed the ductwork, and he probably doesn’t care. Your customer’s impressions of you will mostly come from the respect and courtesy your employees show the customer, not your employees’ technical skills to fix the problem. So, your job is to:

• Develop customer service standards, and include them in job descriptions and performance evaluations.
• Create a training process that explains the how’s and why’s of good customer interactions to your people. Include a written manual.
• Install a feedback loop to make sure your employees are following the standards. This can be a follow-up call from your office with a few standard questions.

Don’t get me wrong, excellent technical expertise is supremely important, but it only becomes an issue if your techs aren’t good at the tech aspect. It’s a prerequisite, not a feature.

The guy who you describe as your best tech is anything but. He may fix the technical problem, but if the customer feels disrespected, he will go elsewhere next time (and tell his friends). Your best tech is the one who leaves the customer with both a solved HVAC problem and the feeling that he (the customer) was the most important person on earth.

Cheers!

Jayme Dill Broudy

Construction Business Owner, April 2010