If Eddie's shop is like mine, the guys that answers the phone, are the guys that do the work. If a call is really necessary, we welcome the call. Most of the time the customer just wants a tweet on every step taken and a running total on his job at the end of each step. An estimate of the job is usually given up front with the understanding that the customer will be notified if we run into something that is going to make the job go over the original estimate.
Most customers think that if they call often enough that the builder will move them to the front of the line but the opposite often happens.
The following is a common scenario and often happens many times a week. Someone comes in with a small job on Monday morning that may only take 30 minutes of time to do the job. We are up to our armpits in work and have many jobs committed to be completed before closing on Friday. We tell the customer if he will leave the item with us we should be able to work it into the schedule and complete it by closing on Friday. We give him an estimate and tell him we will call him as soon as we get it done. The customer has a few related question and a few non-related questions about his job. It took about 10 to 15 minutes to service the customer at this point.
Tuesday morning the customer calls and wants a progress report on his job at this point. We tell him we still have many jobs ahead of him and have not started on it and we will call him as soon as we get it done. "While he has us on the phone" he has some more questions. We really need to get back to work or we are not going to be able to get everything done by the times promised, but we try to be courteous and we take the time and answer his questions. This call wastes another 10 to 15 minutes.
By Thursday the customer is getting worried that we are not going to get his job done by closing on Friday. He calls again Thursday afternoon using the excuse that he has been gone or his new phone has been acting up and may have missed our call. We go over most of the same stuff that we have previously gone over. Another 10 to 15 minutes is wasted. Our schedule is still tight because we have had too many unnecessary phone calls similar to his so we come in early the next morning so that we have time to do his job. We get his job done before 5 pm and call him. He arrives, and we bill him at the standard shop rate for the 30 minutes it took to do his job.
The customer is happy with the work and the price we charged but I wish I had not taken on the job. I charged the customer for 30 minutes at shop rate. I lost over 30 minutes of my time taking unnecessary phone calls which I needed to be used to complete jobs I was working on plus I had to pay overtime to one of my guys to get his job completed by the promised time. I would have made more money and had a lot less stress if I told him to pick up his item and take it somewhere else when he called Tuesday morning for a status report.
Customers like the one described above are what keeps most engine builders and related service type businesses from meeting their projected completion dates.
Again we welcome your calls but be considerate of the time we take and what it cost us to stop the job we are working on and answer the call. I have never had to leave a message for Eddie to call me back. He knows when our name pops up on his caller ID, I am going to be concise, to the point and the call will not waste his time but will make him money.
