A remodeling contractor who strives for big-time success in this business should make customer service an absolute obsession of every person in his organization.
When a customer calls your office or even your cell phone with any kind of a service question, the person answering that phone should make it his/her number one priority to solve that customer’s problem immediately. You must do whatever it takes, contact the correct person to handle it; but do not make a note of it and deal with it later. Do it now!
In this business of residential and commercial remodeling, good to great references are the life blood of your operation. Other contractors can compete with you in many ways; but they cannot compete with or top great references. They are not that hard to get. I will give you an example from a little over a month ago in our business.
We agreed to do a good number of small to handyman tasks for an out-of-state couple who bought a new home in our area and then returned home while we did the work. We treated it like every job we do even though it was not a big dollar amount.
- We emailed them notes about the progress;
- We sent them pictures when we felt it necessary;
- We called them when we thought that they might want to reconsider something;
- We let them know about small problems that they might want to address while we were there; and,
- We found and recommended other contractors for them who were not part of our scope of work so that they could feel comfortable dealing with them.
In essence, we took complete ownership of making sure they had a great experience with us.
Part of our agreement was to have the place “deep-cleaned”. We brought in a company that we felt would do a good job. When we found that we were not completely happy with the overall cleaning we had our own people go in and bring it up to our standards at our expense.
My wife and I personally checked every part of it before agreeing that we were ready to say it was finished. A few days later the homeowners arrived ready to move in. A couple days after that they called to tell us how pleased they were with our commitment to quality and service; and…making sure every detail was done.
Last week the realtor who found them the home called to say that he had just received an email from the couple thanking him for recommending us. We work very hard to achieve that result every time on every project.
Are we obsessed? Yes, we are; and we have just added another homeowner to our list of great references. Become obsessed about your customer service and you will begin to notice higher closing ratios on sales, less discussion about price; and, ultimately, higher profits.
