On customer service & consistency...
I am reading a book called "The 4-Hour Work Week" written by Tim Ferriss at the moment. This book has revealed a few paradigms that I am living that need to be changed.
It section 3 of the book titled "A is for Automation" Tim discusses a well knows Henry Ford quote;
Henry Ford once said, referring to his "Model-T", the best selling car of all time, "The customer can have any color he wants, so long as it's black." Henry understood something that business people seem to have forgotten: Serving the customer ("Customer Service") is not becoming a personal concierge and catering for their every whim and want. Customer service is providing an excellent product at an acceptable price and solving legitimate problems (lost packages, replacements, refunds, etc) in the fastest manner possible. That's it!
I tend to agree with Tim on this issue, often we complicate the situation by delivering more than reasonably expected.
One of our goals within Maintenance Essentials is to deliver a reliable consistent service that meets the customers (unwritten) expectations. This translates into our ability carry out each scheduled routine service within ±1 Hour.
Why is this important?
Currently our industry has a poor public record in this area, and we can do something about it. Unfortunately if you speak to 10 building owners, you will get a common themes about poor service, slow delivery, or as the ACCC has found, even missed tests, etc.
Changing this one performance measure for our industry might sound like 'pie in the sky' stuff, but it is possible, simply by making it a priority!
A few years ago, we established our 'Four Guarantees", one of which is our Performance Guarantee which can be read below. This guarantee was written to ensure we hold ourselves accountable to a standard the most others would not even consider..
We GUARANTEE that we will never miss a scheduled test of your fire systems. If we fail to meet this most basic obligation, then we will refund the value of the service missed, plus the next scheduled inspection and test will be carried out FREE of charge.*
Going one step further, we have recently started to develop & implement a system to track our results, (we believe that if you measure it you can improve it). Our goal is to periodically publish our performance (in respect to this goal) on this web site as we gather the data.
Russ
* Conditions apply, see your Maintenance Essentials sales representative for more information.
