We’re having a lot of work done on our house, including turning our attic into my awesome home office/aerie/fortress of solitude. I like our contractor very much, but now that the work has stretched past two months, it’s starting to wear me down. Earlier this week we were talking about the schedule and without thinking, I said, “I’m really tired of having you guys here.” His very reasonable response was, “Yep, it’s not a convenience.”
I started thinking about the many little ways that this experience has been inconvenient, and some of them could be alleviated somewhat with freely available web tools. So, if you’re a contractor, here are some things you could do that I’m sure your customers would appreciate. They may not all involve social media per se, but the general principles are there.
1. I never know who’s going to be here when.
Once or twice a week, usually when one of us is on our way out the door, the contractor will tell me the upcoming schedule. I don’t write it down, so I certainly don’t remember it. How about putting the schedule in a Google Doc and updating it daily? Or a shared Google Calendar? That would require some extra time at the end of the day on the contractor’s part to update all the schedules for all jobs, but it would be well appreciated.
You could also create a Posterous blog just for this job, and the contractor, subs and homeowner could update that via email. Or a private Facebook group.
2. I don’t know who all these people are.
In the course of our various endeavors, there have been roughly 1,012 tool belt wearers in and out of the house. I have been introduced to all of them, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten a lot of their names. “Although, given that this is the Chapel Hill area, I’ve known a few of them for 15+ years and one is a guitar player famous in the indie rock world”.
Take a picture of the folks who are going to be working on my house with your cell phone, and post them somewhere. They could go on the Posterous blog or the Facebook group, too.
3. I’m not always here to answer questions, and even when I am, they don’t always get asked.
I spent 20 minutes talking to the painting contractor on Monday about what colors went where. On Wednesday his guys showed up without him, and painted one “thankfully small” hallway the wrong color. Again, how about a Google Doc with all the information that anyone can refer to?
4. How can I recommend you to my network if you’re not online?
Again, I’ve been very happy overall with our contractor. I would happily recommend him to my friends. If he had a Facebook page for his business, I would go there and like it, and leave a positive comment. But he doesn’t. I know, like everybody, he’s busy running his business and trying to have a life. But the hour that it would take him to set up a basic page would be time well spent, especially in this tech-heavy, relationship-oriented community.
There are lots of other tools that Google makes available for small and local business, and I’m finding I search for a lot more than just restaurants on Yelp. Plus, small businesses benefit from the Google juice they get from having searchable content on a blog or videos on YouTube, just like big businesses. There’s an electrician in town with a white truck that says www.chapelhillelectrician.com on one side and www.carrboroelectrician.com on the other. That’s a guy who understands the value of SEO to a local business.
But we’ll leave it at that for now. What suggestions would you have for local service providers that would make you a happier customer?
image by geishaboy500