I am a restaurant person. My first job was handing out cheese samples in the mall for a gourmet cheese company. That was my first job serving food and making sales. I love restaurants…and have worked in virtually every position on the org chart. Perhaps I would still be in the restaurant business if my husband hot rod’s partner had not died.

As many of you know, Bio-Clean® is one of the best add-on sales products available to service plumbing contractors. This environmentally friendly biological drain cleaner, which comes in powdered form, is a trade exclusive sold directly to plumbing contractors. This little gem is key to upping your average ticket and showing your clients that you do more than just install and repair.

But, how do you get your service techs to sell it?

The meat market in Lewisville, Texas is a landmark. Not only does the meat market sell meat, it serves great lunches, including outstanding BBQ, homemade pies, etc. Every year, we hold a “Rib Off” at the Service Roundtable where we buy ribs from three different restaurants and conduct blind taste tests for the sauce and meat. The meat market wins every time it’s in the competition.

Sooner or later it happens to everyone in the business. A disgruntled customer notices the prices of parts and merchandise sold at the retail stores and complains about the big markups charged by the contractor. This is a bigger problem for time and material firms, whose prices are itemized for all to see at a glance. However, even we flat raters face it from time to time.

“How much will a new water heater sot me – mine is leaking?” Anyone in the PHC service business hears this question and others like it numerous times a day over the phone. Most attempt to answer it by quoting an hourly labor rate or giving a “ballpark” estimate of what the job will cost based on the caller’s description of the problem.

The more I travel, the more astonishing it is when I find outstanding customer service. If someone is pleasant to me, I am usually delighted, and don’t expect much more. On a recent trip, however, I had an extraordinary customer service experience. It was a simple interaction, but the good feelings it inspired stuck with me for days. That’s a solid indication that I should write about it. So, here goes…

I was staying at a run-of-the-mill Radisson Hotel. The décor was a bit outdated. The carpets were a touch worn. Overall, the hotel facilities were just so-so.

It was the people who made me pay attention, and one person in particular.

I predict that more and more companies will transfer stock ownership to the troops because it works to motivate the employee-owner to work harder, faster, better. They pay attention when it’s their assets and reputation at stake. It is the ultimate empowerment.

A friend of mine, who has a pretty decent compensation package, recently told me that he was getting ready to sell the business. He wanted to give the employees first shot at the sale. As soon as he told them this, their behavior changed virtually overnight. They were always hard workers, but suddenly phone messages were being returned lickety-split. Spare copper fittings were being viewed as inventory rather than garbage. Suggestions for improvement were being proffered left and right.

Jeff Grossarth has been installing floors since he was 13 when he began helping a neighbor with his flooring installation company in Seattle, Washington. At the age of 17 Jeff decided that he wanted to start his own business and in 1980 started Jeff’s Flooring.
In the 1990s Grossarth moved his business to Cookeville, Tennessee and has been installing floors throughout that region ever since.  It was during one particular installation several years ago, in a home located in one of Cookeville’s upscale areas, Grossarth witnessed a catastrophe that changed the …

Last November I wrote about the importance of customer feedback (“How Does Your Customer Service Measure Up?”). Our company tries to stimulate it by providing as the back side of our job ticket a postage-paid self-mailer postcard asking questions about the performance of both our dispatch and field personnel.

This is valuable but not sufficient in itself to give you a clear picture. The postcards rely on the customers to take the initiative. We also try to audit the performance of our service techs with random phone calls to recent customers. These calls serve three distinct purposes:

I was motivated to write this by a phone call I got today. I am not going to mention the company, but I will mention that since my company is “1-800-PLUMBING INC” I do get a significant amount of cold calls from plumbing supply companies trying to sell me everything from pipe wrenches to jumper cables. I just politely let them know I am not a plumber and that my customers are plumbers. I sometimes tell them a bit about how 1-800-PLUMBING works and once they realize there is no opportunity to do business the call is ended. Well, I also get requests for plumbing supplies because in some Yellow Pages, they decided to list my business as a plumbing supply house. Just the other day I was thinking, “gee, I should take the requests for plumbing supplies and sell them to a supply house as they are probably really good leads.”

So for the right company I may be able to build a relationship that is mutually beneficial.

Today, one of those telemarketers called. Yes it was one of the telemarketers that gives telemarketers a bad name. He started out real bubbly like we were old friends, then I politely told him that we are not a plumbing company. At that point in the conversation he said, “well then what the H… do you do? Do you just sit at a desk and push pencils all day?”