What’s Involved in a Service Call?

It’s a random Tuesday afternoon, your air conditioner has stopped working and you reach out to your friendly neighborhood service provider to get help. Seems simple, right? You pick up the phone or send an email and in a few minutes you have an appointment for someone to fix your air conditioner and get you back to cool and comfortable. Let’s pull back the curtain a bit and give you a look at the massive effort it takes for us to service our clients daily.

Our days typically start around 6:00 AM with folks that man the warehouse and call center rolling into the building. The install teams are making their way in along with service techs, managers, dispatchers, and other support individuals. By 6:45 or so our 20,000+ sq. ft. facility is a bustle of people, trucks, forklifts, suppliers making deliveries, vehicles being fueled up, equipment being loaded and an overall very organized chaos takes place until about 7:30. By this time we have been officially open for 30 minutes and the trucks plus a small army of personnel are rolling out.

So, what happens when you make that service call on our end you ask? When you first call in you are going to be greeted by one of our customer service representatives, or CSR’s for short. The main job of our CSR team is to capture your information quickly and accurately, get an idea of what the problem or issue is, then do their best to make you smile. From the keyboards of the CSR’s your problem is then sent to the dispatch team and the real magic begins.

The Dispatch Communications Center is the heart and soul of our company. We service 100+ households a day all over Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Duval counties, and if that sounds like a logistical nightmare you would be correct. The job of the dispatch team is to first see what the service issue you are having is, and then figure out which one of our team members is the best choice to solve your problem, finally they make sure we are not sending the service tech from southern Miami to Jacksonville. The dispatch board is a living breathing thing that must be constantly managed, people call in with true emergencies like burst water pipes, phones are constantly ringing, emails are pouring in and our dispatch team keeps juggling a massive amount of information every hour of every day. Okay, now the dispatchers have the service tech on their way to your home, what’s next?

When our service professional arrives, he or she will first give you a clear explanation of what is about to take place in your home. Outside of regular maintenance calls when we are at your house it is because something is broken and just not doing its job, you are stressed out, and the first thing we try to do is to let you know things are going to be better shortly. I am going to date myself here slightly, however when I think of our Service Techs, I picture Mighty Mouse flying in with his catch phrase, “Here I come to save the day!!” So, fast forward, your problem is solved, things have returned to normal in your humble abode and it’s time to pay the bill.

This is where another unseen department comes in, as with any company we have accounts receivable to process payments, accounts payable to take care of our bills, a whole other group of people to balance the books and then of course we have a purchasing department to re-stock the material that we use every day. We also of course have a full management team that makes sure these orchestras we play in every day stay in rhythm and harmony.

So my friends, the next time you have a problem in your home, remember… it takes the efforts of a lot of individuals that you have never seen or met to make your problems go away. All of us at Art Plumbing, AC and Electric are very lucky to have such a talented group working in tandem to service the needs of our service areas since 1983 and for years to come.

Until next time, as many of you already know I love a good play on words, I am thinking my goal is to be punstoppable.

House Whisperer out!!