The world is moving fast these days, it seems like everybody is rushing around in their own zone with so many things to do. Take our freeways and roads for example with the lack of patience and respect a lot of people show towards merging and general road rules.  Do you get that feeling of frustration when your held up in traffic or even at a shop where you’ve dropped in to grab something quick but end up waiting in a slow moving queue.

Yes it’s frustrating but is that extra 2 minutes or maybe even 10 or 15 minutes really going to affect our lives so much to the point of stressing about it.

I’m writing this thinking of what the world as short as 10-15 years ago felt or even looked like.

I received a cheque the other day. (which is a very rare thing these days.) Well I walked into the bank expecting to fill out a deposit form. Looking around there was no forms or slips of any description. There was one teller in the whole branch. Everything was digital, no face to face customer service. What is going on?

Large companies and corporations desperately want our business and that is evident through the amount of advertising they throw at us on a daily basis, but what do we get in return that is better than 10-15 years ago when they had a number of tellers able to support and help you without going through steps on a computer or spending a number of frustrating minutes trying to correctly pronounce a word so the machine on the other end of the phone can decipher it.

Some will say its quicker and more efficient, (I may just be naïve). I think there’s less of an emphasis on customer service these days and you can feel it as you walk into some, not all businesses and corporations.

It’s fine for us younger generation, who have grown up with technology and learnt to use and adapt. But look at the amount of people we may be leaving behind in the process. They’ve probably been using the banks or businesses services for many, many years and they feel confused and disheartened.

Now to what this whole article is based around Customer Service.

I believe in face to face customer service, that could just be me? Being face to face you are able to pick up so much more information through facial expressions, tones, actions and just the feel or vibe. This can be all very welcoming and comforting to otherwise hesitant clients.

The plumbing industry is one of the oldest trades in the world and we are and always have been built around face to face customer service. There is no other way, we have to come into people’s private sanctuary’s being their homes and fix problems. There’s a level of trust involved with this. Have you ever hired the services of a particular business that arrived at your house looking a bit rough around the edges, immediately you may be thinking to yourself, jeez I should’ve looked around a bit more.

This can be understandable as you are giving them access to areas that so few people in this world (if you think about it) have been, let alone people you don’t even know.

This is why customer service in the plumbing industry is so important to establish that level of comfort between the customer.

Yes, these days it may be a bit more fast paced and no, you may not have time to sit down for a beer with the customer after every job ?, but that doesn’t mean we let the use and speed of technology govern how we treat our clients. The customary interaction between someone with a problem (customer) and someone trying to solve it (plumber) can be a very enlightening and fulfilling thing.

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