One of the things we dislike the most is saying no to a customer. It doesn’t happen very often but it does happen and it’s a bummer.

We operate two separate facilities with two separate teams that handle the scheduling of jobs now, in the future, and emergencies. Those are the 3 most basic types of jobs we do. There is quite a balancing act that goes on daily in those respective locations in regards to customer requests and needs.

Starting at 7:30am in the morning we already have a schedule made up for our technicians day, they have their clipboards and are loading their trucks (if it wasn’t done the night before). We have strategically left small blocks of time in the daily schedule for a couple of different reasons. We know from experience that we should leave a little time available because you can never be 100% sure how long a particular job will take. Additionally, we leave some time for emergency service and some calls that may come in during the day. The scheduling teams also use the weather forecasts, among other tools, and they know a few days in advance when adverse weather may slow us down a little or create additional service calls.

Take this morning for example. Yesterday and into last night we had a snowstorm and the temperatures dropped very rapidly overnight coming off a couple of moderate temperature “pre-spring” days. We’ve answered the phone more than a few times for customers whose doors have frozen shut. For those that have garage door openers installed this can be problematic. Pushing the button on an opener when the garage door has neatly sealed itself to the floor with ice has a habit of tweaking and even breaking some parts on the opener. Those folks, whose door is now inoperable, reach out for assistance. Much like many businesses we have to treat incoming calls on a first called, first served basis.

Remember our technicians have already left for the day with previously scheduled appointments that customers are expecting. Now our super hero’s spring into action using customer location and service type they quickly fill up what little time we have conveniently left open for these situations on todays schedule. But more customers are calling. In some cases it’s completely within reason to have a sales person or even one of the schedulers go to a customer’s location to help get cars out of the garage so they can get to work or an appointment. From there our hero’s can make future appointments to get things fixed up right.

If all goes exactly as planned they have moved some things around, contacted the trucks in the field, without inconveniencing any customers while getting our technicians back to the office at a reasonable time so they can go home and have dinner with their families.

A collective sigh of relief descends on the office and happy high fives are exchanged. The phone rings again. We are now officially out of resources for the day. Two things are now true, we have no availability and the customer needs our help today. But our super hero’s are not out of options just yet. In these cases we will go to length to assist the customer by phone and with some luck get them out of their garage or recommending a temporary fix until we can get there. If none of that can satisfy the situation only then the dreaded “no” or “not until” phrases get used.

It’s not that we don’t want to or we’re not willing to go the extra mile (which we do daily for the great customers in our service areas) it’s just that we can’t. The 7 words that make any of us cringe are “Ok, I’ll have to call someone else.” That’s our kryptonite and it’s like a sucker punch to our gut.

What we want to let everyone know is that we will move, modify, bend, extend, and use any other tool in our arsenal to make sure you, and everyone else, gets the absolute best garage door service anywhere. If you are communicating with us and we have to say no to any service it’s not out of convenience for us, no way. Believe us when we tell you we’ll do everything possible to help you out as quickly as we can but sometimes, just sometimes we may say no and it’s only because we have other awesome customers in the schedule that need us too.

Your Overhead Door Team – Of Rutland Vermont