Last month, I had a rather unusual experience with a service contractor. As a club member, I am a repeat customer of this business — and it was time to do a routine inspection of my equipment. A CSR called the day before to confirm the appointment for the next day. I was told someone would be out after 12 p.m. I confirmed the time worked for me and I would be home.

Fast forward to the next day, and I didn’t hear anything at all — which is unusual. So finally, after 5 p.m., I called to see if they were still coming. The CSR confirmed their techs work until 8 p.m., and I was on the list. Great! We hung up and then my mom called.

While I was on the phone for the next 15 minutes, I received a text message from the company at 5:26 p.m. (not more than 10 minutes after I had called) saying they had a technician available to dispatch to my home, asking if I was available. Now, I was on the phone, so I didn’t get the text message. When I hung up, I saw that missed message along with a follow-up message from the company saying, “Hi, at this time since we have not heard back from you, we are sending our technician on to another call, and you will need to call the office at [insert phone number] to reschedule your appointment as we are at capacity for today. Thank you.”

That second message was sent just four minutes after the first at 5:30 p.m. If you add on the fact I had just spoken to a CSR confirming the appointment, I admit that I was a bit frustrated. I called the company again and got a voicemail, so I left a message explaining the situation. When the CSR called back, she did apologize for what happened but continued to talk over my concerns about the lack of communication, saying repeatedly that she just wanted to get me rescheduled. Finally, she said she talked to a manager who said they had waited a long time for me to respond to the text, and that they called me as well.

Now, I know they didn’t call me. My phone has call-waiting and I would have heard the incoming call. And since my text messages are timestamped, I know they didn’t wait very long for a response. So someone was lying. What I experienced was a complete and utter communication breakdown.

People are only human, and mistakes happen. So I reached out to some of the best coaches in the industry for some perspective on my situation and best practices for how contractors should handle issues like these.

“Every call is individual — you’re the only one that should matter to us at that moment,” says Sandy Papavero, director of sales and marketing for CEO Warrior. “Customer service is the lifeblood of your business. That communication should never have flowed that way. The CSR would probably be the one to do the intake call, and they probably passed it to the dispatch center, or they didn’t know or communicate it properly to dispatch and you got some random text. They need training.”

Papavero notes that every one is different how they set up text messaging, but customers should get appointment notifications after booking, then again either 24 hours or 12 hours prior to the appointment time, then once again when the tech is 30 minutes out.

“One-half hour to 20 minutes before the tech’s arrival, you should've received a phone call telling you that they're on the way,” she says. “They should be asking where to park. They should be asking if there are any pets in the home and which door to come to. And a lot of our service experts and companies go as far as to say, ‘Hey, I'm going to be stopping for fuel on my way (only if I'm not late) and can I pick you up a coffee or anything?’ It’s the over-the-top experience — 99% of the time, you’re saying ‘no.’ But that’s how you should be communicated with.

“If they get stuck at another job and are running late, someone in dispatch should have called you and said, ‘Ms. Nicole, thank you so much for the opportunity to serve you. You are in good hands. Although we have run late on our last job, we want to make sure that you're still going to be available. What I'm seeing is that the service expert's going to be about 20 minutes to an hour late.’ And then I would've said, ‘For your inconvenience,’ right, when it gets to a point, we should have offered them maybe a $25 off coupon, a Starbucks gift card or something about what we can do for you. It should be proactive and not reactive,” she adds.

The ball was dropped a second time when it came time to reschedule the appointment, Papavero points out. “The CSR should listen to a customer and never become defensive. We want to make sure you’re seen, heard and understood. It was a direct drop of the ball, and the customer wants to hear them say it. In that situation, I would've reviewed your account, seen that you've been with us for several years and I would have addressed that. ‘Nicole, you've been with us for years and are a valued client. We're so grateful and thankful for you as a club member of ours. Have you seen this kind of service in the past or was today a kind of isolated incident?’ I want to take you back in history and I want to make sure that you understand that you were valued, and you've been happy up until right now.”

Then the CSR should ask, “What would you like done at this point,” Papavero explains. And while some customers will ask for a free appointment or visit, CSRs should never focus on what they cannot do.

“Always stay on the stance of what you can do,” she explains. “I would say, ‘What I can do for you is we’re going to waive your diagnostic fee and your consultation fee for today. It’s the very least we can do. I’m also going to attach a $25 restaurant gift card of your choice…’ or whatever they have in their wheelhouse to provide. Every contractor should have some kind of thank-yous for big-ticket items. Then we can move on. It should have never been, ‘I just want to get you rescheduled’ to where you feel unwanted, unappreciated or not valued.

“The average lifetime value of a client is usually around $55,000 to $60,000, and I just cast you aside,” Papavero continues. “So that CSR was not trained properly and the communication breakdown was awful. But this is a training opportunity. As a manager, I want to hear from both perspectives because tonality is important, so I would listen to the call. The second step would be looking at our processes and determining where did it fail. If I found the CSR was not following the protocol, I would be less inclined to reprimand than to train.”

Lynn Wise, CEO of Contractor in Charge, explains that membership clubs for service companies should be treated as their loyalty program and have an entirely separate process than non-member customers.

“Everything from when they initiate the selling of the membership, servicing the membership and nurturing the membership should be handled differently,” she says. “Contractors tend to put everybody in the same bucket and try to figure it out. They’re not organized. And they should never, ever, ever service a membership that’s working in the summer because their demand load is too high. If they were to set this up right, they would stay in touch with your throughout the course of the year, touch base and find ways to thank you for your loyalty and find ways to engage you. The other part would be pre-scheduling these appointments in the spring and fall, when it’s not hot and not cold.”

Wise also notes that a communication best practice is proactive communication, not reactive communication.

“You got reactive communication,” she says. “The fact that they only allowed you four minutes to respond to a text is, by the way, that's just crazy. There should be another buffer in there, call it 10 minutes, whatever. But to do that is just inappropriate. The settings in their software that cut you off weren't long enough for you to reply. I just feel like what went wrong, it wasn't so much that you got a text, it was that they tried to rearrange a schedule and didn't have the proper layup to rearrange it. They did it via text, which might be OK, but you should have been able to say within 15 minutes. Or, don't text me, call me. She should have called you and she should have said, ‘Hey, Nicole, we have a person ready right now for the next 15 minutes. I've got him on hold for you. Please give us a callback. If you can't return the call, please know that we're going to go ahead and stick with your regular scheduled appointment.’ But they shouldn't have canceled you.”

Wise explains that communication is crucial for a home services business because field service management software manages the job, not the customer relationship.

“In customer relationship management, when you speak to me in the ideal situation, I am taking notes and capturing what we talk about,” she says. “When you call back in, guess what? I can see those notes from the prior discussion. Field service management does not have that kind of workflow. It has an area for notes, but it doesn’t have what I would consider to be communication spaces. And a lot of inner office communication is somewhat devised based on what they think they need with third-party options. I would argue that memberships should be handled from soup-to-nuts by a membership group. The lack of a focus on the membership is really, in my opinion, what is broken down. Because they don’t have dedicated roles for things they do in their office, they have one, two or 10 people doing everything, the context and the focus gets lost. And what happens is the customer experience suffers with that lack of system.”

Wise adds that all CSRs who answer phones should be trained in de-escalation and to offer empathy and sympathy and to find a way to meet a resolution without getting somebody else involved.

“All the agents in my office are trained in de-escalation,” she says. “That’s always the first path. I’m sure you didn’t jump up and holler, but certainly, you were disappointed and wanted another result. Had it been me, I would have moved heaven and earth to get you on the board that day. I would have known you were a member, for how many years, and how much you’ve spent with the company. Instead, they gave you a mediocre solution, ‘I just need to get you rescheduled.’ So the secret is how do you de-escalate and not put somebody on the defensive? At that point, she honestly should have said, ‘You know what, I need to get with my manager. I want to get back with you and see if we can’t work something out.’”

As I previously said, mistakes happen. You get new employees on the job that maybe aren’t as experienced as others. But that’s why we have processes and checks in place, such as recording CSR calls for training and education purposes. Every customer complaint (within reason, obviously) can be viewed as a training opportunity for your team. Make sure you’re using the feedback to become better service providers.