That’s Too Much Trouble

A recent post on Michael Stone’s blog raises an interesting point—many contractors seem to have plenty of time to complain, but no time to fix or prevent the object of their complaints. He tells the story of a contractor who was receiving complaints that his employees were damaging things they didn’t work on. Michael suggesting taking pictures prior to starting work. The contractor declared that that would be too much trouble.

Apparently, dealing with customer complaints wasn’t too much trouble. Apparently, upsetting customers is preferable to avoiding the complaints. Apparently, an ounce of prevention isn’t worth a pound of cure (in this contractor’s opinion).

Years ago we noticed that we seemed to get the same types of complaints over and over. It wasn’t that we had tons of complaints, just that the one we got were similar. I sat down with my supervisors and we made a list of the common complaints and what caused them. We discovered, like the contractor above, that most of these were pre-existing conditions. But we were getting blamed for them!

So we put together procedures to identify these items before starting any work, and we then brought them to the customer’s attention. Not surprisingly, most of the time the customer was unaware of these issues. But when inspecting their fresh paint job, they would have seen these issues and assumed we were responsible. Suddenly the complaints virtually stopped. And we often were able to sell additional work to correct the problem.

The little extra time we spent addressing these problems has saved us countless hours over the years, avoided upsetting customers, and perhaps best of all, helped us increase our sales.