PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian R: So you accused me on the last podcast, Beon. Of all of my jokes and illustrations being about pants.

Beon D: Well, not all like 95.6%? Maybe?

Ian R: Okay, well, almost. So I thought we’d start out the podcast with a pants joke. What do you see when a duck pulls down his pants?

Beon D: I’m not gonna venture a guess this is a PG show, right?

Ian R: His butt quack! You see, you thought I was gonna open with a Will Smith joke or something. And I just circled right around to the pants thing.

Beon D: Yeah, No, that’s great. You know, we can only go up from here. So I guess it’s a good way to open up.

Ian R: Well, that’s left up to opinion, I guess. We’ll see how the rest of this goes. So today we’re going to be talking about not pants, or Will Smith, but we’re going to talk about complaints. So complaints from clients happen? Listen, I’ve been a home inspector for the better part of two decades, you could do a perfect inspection every time, you’re still going to get a complaint. There are some people online, I’ll look at bad reviews of restaurants because I’m just a weirdo. Like, why did they leave a bad review? This doesn’t make sense. I’ll click on their little Google profile. It’s just one complaint right after another a lot of these people I’m like, they’re just never happy. They’ve never given a five-star review. So that’s just kind of how things go. So I wanted to talk about it because it’s something that comes up often enough.

Beon D: I think it’s a good topic. Me, I’ve worked corporate most of my life. So, you know, angry co-workers are probably about as far as I’ve gotten as far as my job. So you get a carry a lot of this. But I mean, I guess in life, we all come across people in situations where tensions run high, somebody’s unhappy, but I think where your input is going to be valuable, because this is specifically a situation now, as a home inspector, somebody is unhappy with you? Well, maybe that’s what we always assume. Maybe that’s part of the problem. We’ll talk about that too. We’re gonna have to lean on you heavily over here, as we go through.

Ian R: Well, you know, what it comes down to is, first of all, it’s the market. So listen, if you’re going to go buy a $300,000 house, you end up getting an inspection on it, and the inspection comes out, okay? But then you end up overpaying for that house and you pay $340,000, you didn’t have anything left in your budget, you were competing with 15 other people for the house, and you’re stressed. Six months later, when the dishwasher breaks, you have a complaint, the only person you can really go back to is the home inspector. Or that at least in their mind. My dishwasher is broken. I’m actually saying this out of experience. I had a client who bought a house, this was probably back in 2009 or something. Bought a house they couldn’t afford. They moved in the dishwasher worked fine. In New York state actually not part of our SOP, you know, I just turned it on and make sure it works. Just for the heck of it. I want to make sure it works. Six months later, our dishwasher is broken. What are you going to do about it? I’m like, I am going to go watch Star Trek and hang out with my family for a little bit. I don’t know, what do you want me to do about it? That’s how I ultimately kind of ended up on it. At first, it’s always, like you said feels like a personal attack. You’re not a good inspector, you’re a terrible person. Why would you allow this to happen to me? There are a lot of emotions that fly out in those kinds of situations.

Beon D: Yeah, actually, that whole scenario you described there, because if you really dig into that, you know, the dishwasher breaking is really kind of the tip of the iceberg. And by the time they call you they’ve decided it’s your problem. But you know, the rest of the situation described there’s a lot of reasons for them to be stressed out. They’re you know, you’re overextended on your home, something breaks, you don’t have money to fix it, you know, I’m stressed, who am I going to get to fix this? Oh, this guy. You kind of get the end of all of that but I guess it just kind of maybe shows you going through that process. When you get the call, there may be a whole history behind the actual call.

Ian R: What it comes down to is exactly like that. It’s just buyer’s remorse taken out on the home inspector. That’s what it is. I mean, sometimes people legitimately complain, hey, I got my inspection report a day after you said it would Oh, I forgot to push the send button, whatever it happened to be. There are complaints like that we’re talking about after the fact somebody is complaining about the thoroughness of your inspection. How do we deal with it because I have seen home inspectors deal with this in amazing ways? Once I’m like man, I’m taking note of what they’re doing. Then I’ve seen, unfortunately, home inspectors not take care of it really well. I’ve seen home inspectors respond very angrily, right off the bat, throw out a bunch of accusations and all that did was add fuel to the fire. So we want to take it very systematically when we have a complaint. We want to know what’s behind it, and what’s the most effective way to address it. When I say effective, we don’t want this thing floating around for the next three months, just keeping us up at night. How do we make the complaint stop, get a resolution, and just move on with whatever we’re doing?

Beon D: Maybe it’s getting one’s own thinking when you receive a complaint because I mean, you have the elevated blood pressure rush to your head immediately you’re up in maybe you attempted to match the energy or whatever. From what you were just describing now, I’m just thinking, if one viewed a complaint, as really, it’s an opportunity in a way to offer good customer service. You got to go about it in the right way. I mean, imagine it’s like peeling a bit of an onion.

Ian R: Yeah, and I’ll give a shout-out to Dave Klima. Because he has kind of the same mentality as I do. He goes to resolve it, take it as an opportunity to advertise, and tell everybody how you came to a resolution, and it’s an advertising piece. Some of my agents that have referred us for over a decade came from man, that was a sketchy situation that you guys handled. Thank you so much. You’re gonna take care of all my clients. So there’s an opportunity and stories behind that too that I’ll share later. I think we should get right into the meat and potatoes of our discussion here. How to actually deal with complaints. So what’s the first thing that we should do when we get a complaint? In my opinion, nothing. I’ve always found that when somebody complains, don’t respond right away. A couple of reasons. We don’t want to ignore them, either. We don’t want to say okay, well, I’m just gonna let this sit here for three days. Right when that message comes in an email, whatever it happens to be, it’s not a good time to respond. We may not feel that we’re being emotional. We could have emotions later on that we look back and say, Oh, I wish I just waited an hour. Sometimes I find that if you give it a little bit of time, maybe they cc’d somebody else on the email like their attorney or you know, the agent, and they end up responding and saying, No, I don’t think you quite understand that was in the property condition disclosure. Oh, and then you get a little apology later, I found that a good 1/5 of complaints end up going away. Just by seeing you know what happens? I had a client one-time complaint, I forget exactly what it was about. Like two hours later, they emailed me back and they said, Ian, I’m sorry, I was upset. Whatever broke wasn’t actually broken. It was just a little maintenance issue. I don’t know why I took this out on you and he signed it namaste. Just remember that like, okay, but that resolved itself just by me waiting a couple of hours. Okay. I’m not gonna respond right away. I’ll take a look at this after I go take care of a couple of things. We don’t want to ignore it either. I see so many guys. Oh, I got this complaint. I’m like, Oh, what did you say? Oh, nothing. Like, wasn’t that you told me that was last week. All they’re doing over there stewing about it. Call them or something.

Beon D: Yeah, that’s a great idea. You know, I think we’re taught from when you’re a kid, you feel this, like unrighteous sort of indignation welling in you, and you want to just match the energy somebody yells at you, I’m gonna yell back at him, you know, but when it comes to our business, even if you feel those feelings welling up, then especially it’s not the time to respond. Just give it a moment, it may resolve itself, but it also gives you time to kind of just calm down and think objectively.

Ian R: Yeah, and think about their emotions, too. If they’re writing an angry email right then, or they’re giving you an angry phone call, that’s probably the height of their emotions. Give them time to sit back and think I regret leaving that. I do not feel good about that message. I’ll use myself as a bad example. One time there was an HVAC company. It’s funny how this one turned out. But at the beginning of it, I left an angry message. Somebody did some HVAC work and it was bad. It was not good at all. There were some big mistakes made so when I say angry message I wasn’t yelling there was no swearing, I’m like, I think you guys need to resolve this right now. You know, my grumpy voice. Then and then like an hour later, I was like, Man, I don’t want to ruin anybody’s day like that. I hate it when people do that to me. So left another message I’m sorry guys. I’m just a little upset. If you could just give me a callback. We can get this taken care of.

Beon D: That was Ian’s “I’m sorry” voice, everybody.

Ian R: That is my “I’m sorry” voice. It sounds a lot like my angry voice. I have a voice modulation Center. It was really awkward at the high school dance. “a little bit softer now, a little bit softer”.

Beon D: I am not yelling right now.

Ian R: You see, you said it was only gonna go up from here. I’ve already digressed.

Beon D: Well, you know, it’s like watching the financial markets lately, we’re up and then we’re down. exactly.

Ian R: But you know, when we finally do respond, we want to make sure that we listen. So you say you have a lot of experience in the corporate world, but you also have contracting experience. When you’re dealing with somebody who’s upset or somebody in the contracting world why’s listening, so important there Beon?

Beon D: Well, think about how you feel when you’re upset about something. And you maybe even have a list in your mind of issues you want to take up with a particular person, the most therapeutic thing somebody can do for you that will make you feel better is doing what just being able to get through the list and feel you had your say, right. Maybe even just if you’re really angry feeling. Like, man, I really gave it to him, I told him exactly what for, you know. So just imagine that’s how the person feels speaking to you. let them get it out, just let him process and let him totally fully express themselves. It’ll help them to calm down, and, you know, will be a step towards the right direction. At least that’s what I would say, in my experience.

Ian R: Yeah, and that’s true, it kind of endears the person to you. If we know someone’s going to listen to us and hear us out. Really kind of hard to stay angry at them. We don’t have to say, Oh, yes, you’re exactly right about that defect. I should have found that. Okay. You know, I can, I can see what you’re saying. So, tell me a little bit more about it. Really hard to stay mad at a guy who’s, you know, being nice to you and listening to you letting you talk it out. But then at the same time, usually in there describing the issue, we may find out it’s not the issue that we were thinking it was. We had a complaint not long ago, and they were just upset. They wrote an email and really wasn’t clear. So what I thought it was, was something bigger than it actually was. Like, oh, well, hey, I’m sorry. You weren’t happy with the inspection? No, no, we were happy with the inspection. We just had a question on this. You know, they were just writing random emails all over, you know, just if we listened through, Oh, okay. It wasn’t what we were thinking at all. We might have been thinking, Oh, hey, we have to get our entire HVAC system replaced. And they’re like, No, we were just asking if you had a good contractor recommendation if we ever want to replace it. I’m surprised at myself how often when I go back to read the email or go back to listen to the voicemail. Oh, maybe they’re talking about something different. Let me step back for a minute. So listening is totally key. Also, not assuming that they’re blaming you. Sometimes they’re just looking for help. We had a situation, it wasn’t even a situation, a lady wrote an email to us with lots of exclamation points in it. and, you know, we tend to infer our own emotions from emails. We’ve talked about that before. If we think they’re being angry with us, we’re inferring everything that they’re saying with anger, angst, and just all sorts of problems. Really, she was just looking for help with how to turn the hot water on in her shower, which we laughed about later on. She was complaining because she couldn’t get hot water and one of her showers. We had actually told her that there could be an issue somewhere down the line with this and she just wanted to know, Oh, hey, you told me about that. What did you say for me to do? How do we fix that? And it was resolved right away. From her email, even going back looking at it, it was an angry email. It exclamation points and things like that but she was just really emphatic, I guess. I don’t know. Cuz talking with her she’s like, Oh, okay. You guys are so sweet. Thank you very much.

Beon D: Yeah, it’s funny, you mentioned that, like, you know, my father, he’s an excellent communicator. Always thinks out things really well, but he’s gotten in the habit of using exclamation marks and all caps, and he’s emailed to me. The first time he sent it to me, I was like, whoa, okay. He’s like, really mad, you know, but then I’ll call him and it’s just because he was frustrated with the situation and kind of like, you know, it wasn’t directed at me at all. So, yeah, all caps and exclamations don’t always mean what we think they do.

Ian R: Yeah. This also brings me to my next point. I do not like to deal with complaints about the written format. If we’re inferring our own emotions, from an email, or a text message, they’re doing the same thing. Personally, I don’t have any research to back this just from personal experience. I find the phone call or just talking in person, quelches the whole fire. When you’re standing there smiling, shaking their hand heartened for your own angry emotions on that message after that

Beon D: depends on how hard you shake their hand, I guess.

Ian R: I guess so, or how creepy it was. It comes down to just communicating well with them, I love to make just a phone call they email me, I wait a little bit, I call them and say, hey, I want to get back to you. So what’s going on? Can you explain your email to me a little bit, I find that in itself calms the situation down. Even if it escalates a little bit more, they’re still upset on the phone. Like 1/5 of issues can get taken care of, you know, just by waiting, as we mentioned before, another fifth can be taken care of by the telephone. Another fifth or more can be taken care of by just making a quick visit. There was a client that had a complaint because some other pest inspector found some pest damage that we found, and they were actually wrong, which was a funny situation. But he was upset. I said Hang on. I’ll be right over. In a long pause. What? Like, Yeah, hang on, just pop on by I’m not far away. Do you do that? Like, yeah, why not? I’ll come to take a look. As soon as I showed up, oh, my goodness, offering coffee, thanking me for showing up. It was just a much better situation. It really calms things down. If they are still angry with you for making a site visit, there’s probably not much that’s going to calm that situation down. The site visits have always been better. And then you kind of get your eyes on things. Sometimes we were just talking about how that was not always the issue. We think it is. There was this lady who bought a condo. We tested the doors. There are only two outside doors in her condo. We tested both of them. Everything worked fine. So like a month later, she calls us my doors broken. Oh, okay. We tested the door, it worked fine. We have a picture of it right here. We wrote down we tested it. You only have two doors. It was one of the sliding doors to her outside balcony. She said it was gonna cost like five grand to fix? What in the world? Is this? The gold-plated door? The property manager had come over and said, no it’s a structural issue. This door has this weird problem that yada yada yada. We’re gonna have to replace the whole thing for five grand and you’re going to get a fine for your condo. The poor woman was beside herself. So my business partner says, Hang on, I’ll pop on by the same reaction what? He goes, Yeah, I’ll take a drive out there. You’re only like, what, 30 minutes away? Hang on, I’ll be right over. greeted him at the door. Thank you so much. I was beside you know, totally took the situation by surprise but interestingly, what happened, he walks over to the door, looks at the door, pulls a screwdriver out of his pocket. You have to know this guy. He reaches under because he knows more about a home than almost anybody I know. He goes click, he looks at me and he goes “all fixed”. He fixed the door with a screwdriver in about two seconds. It wasn’t even a full minute. She goes, “you’re joking, right?” He goes, “No, every one of these units has this exact door in it. It must have just hit a little piece of gravel or dirt or something and came off the tracks lately.” He goes, “Your building manager. I don’t know what he was saying. But if he’s gonna make you replace your door, he’s gonna have to replace every door in this building.” We checked up on her later on she goes, Yep, that was exactly it. The door works fine. The building manager backed off and the problem was resolved.

Beon D: Yeah, Isn’t that awesome? Now, those stories just make me realize that I think in this sort of age, we’re accustomed to being frustrated by customer service. You know, I mean, have you ever tried to get customer service on an Amazon order? I mean, come on, you can’t even find a number to call or anything you know. Most likely, you end up with the first level of support, who really doesn’t know anything, doesn’t want to help you, their job is pretty much to make you go away. So I think when people now want to engage you with a problem that they’re upset about, you know, they’re already expecting that you’re not going to want to do anything about it. So, you know, they’re in like overdrive already. When you offer that it’s almost like what you said. Wow, what an opportunity to be able to really offer good customer service. I mean, imagine the review that those clients will not do of your services. It’s really a good approach.

Ian R: As you had mentioned before, it’s an opportunity for marketing. If I remember right, she left us a great review, she was thrilled. My accountant always talks about missed opportunity costs. A bad review from that client, you don’t know the opportunity that you missed on that. The cost and time, did it take us half an hour to drive there, less than a minute to fix the door, and half an hour to drive to wherever we were going? Yeah, that was an hour, it would have taken many hours to try to resolve that over email or on the phone. Dealing with this property manager and all this other crazy stuff. It was the fastest resolution to the complaint. Let me pop in. Sometimes we’re uncomfortable with that. I don’t want to go see an angry person but almost immediately, as you said, they’re like, wow, you’re gonna do that, for me. Really quenches the situation but that brings us to, should we fix things?

Beon D: Well, you know, it’s funny, as you were telling the story, I was just thinking to myself, Okay, home inspector, going back to fix something. So where do we stand on that? What is? I mean, obviously, you’ve done it on occasion. What do you think? Where’s the line?

Ian R: So the line comes down to, in my opinion, what you are able to actually do? Don’t overestimate our construction skills. Can you start taking apart their boiler and fixing it?

Beon D: Negative.

Ian R: Yeah, maybe not the best idea if that’s not your skill set. If you’re an old HVAC contractor, you’ve done it for 30 years, you know, the problem? Maybe go for that. I’ll tell you a story of actually, this agent referred us forever. So my first inspection with this agent, show up, and the guy was kind of rough around the edges, but he was what you call a good old boy. Like, you know, here’s this, here’s outside and he’s spitting on the sidewalk and shows up in his pickup truck. I and him were just, I was loving the guy. I’m like, You’re just so much fun to be around. He’s, he’s like yelling at me. He’s like, you can take it, Ian, like, yes, that’s okay. I’m fine. Remind me of like every one of my cousins. So, but he called so angry, like two months after the inspection, and in my area takes a while to close. I guess he had a couple of other hitches along the way with a mortgage or whatever, I don’t know. Two months later, he called me because my toilet doesn’t work. Like, your toilet doesn’t work?. He’s just like, now there’s sewage all over my basement. Like, why is there sewage in your basement? Is it the first-floor toilet? I’m like, wait a second. It didn’t make sense because their one bathroom is over a crawlspace. I’m like, and when he’s describing other stuff. I have my sink taken out of my bathroom. I’m like, Okay, hang on a second. Let’s figure this out. So I was literally doing an inspection just like 10 minutes away. So I swung by.

Beon D: You’re a brave man. First of all, I’ll say that. Well. “I got a basement full of sewage.” Ian is like, “yeah, I’ll be right by.”

Ian R: Hang on, I got my snorkeling equipment. So I show up. I walk into the house and he has his first floor, bathroom, taken apart. Everything is taken apart. I’m like, what happened here. He’s still a little upset. So I narrow it down. There was the four-inch main drain line in the basement, which ran along one long wall and then took an L and went out to the street. So they had support for one section of pipe. Apparently, when they moved out of the house, somebody either kicked it or broke it because I had a picture of it in my report, like right there and it was just gone. So the pipe had no support. So it was dumping sewage on the floor. I’m like, so this is your problem. He’s like, Yes, I’m like, then why is your bathroom taken apart? He’s like, I didn’t know where to start. So I look at the guy. And the agents messaging me. She’s freaking out because he’s talking about lawsuits and stuff. She didn’t know what to do and I look at the guy and I go, Dude, you’re a boob. He laughs and smacks me on the back and he goes, Yeah, I know. I’m like, hang on, let me get some stuff and we’ll fix this together. We fix it together. The guy’s just like, Oh, you’re awesome. Thank you so much. You’re awesome. Anytime. Anytime you want to come over, I’ll grill for you. Like, right after I just cleaned up your raw sewage.

Beon D: Well, yeah, so I mean, goodness, me, I give you a lot of credit for doing that.

Ian R: But that was a little, little extreme.

Beon D: I was just gonna say we are giving advice here on you know how far to go. So where’s the line between a one-handed fix of a sliding door and you know, basically cleaning somebody’s sewer line.

Ian R: So here’s the line, we have to draw it for ourselves. That sewer line was a 15-minute fix for me just because I had to go get some stuff and figure out what he had. I had to talk with him and he was there with me, quote-unquote, trying to help me. So that was 15 minutes for me. It was easy. That 15 minutes got me. Voicemail after voicemail of thank you’s from him. He kept sending me text messages. This is mint now this is mint. And the agent was saying, Oh, my goodness, I put your cards out at the office, you didn’t have to do that. We didn’t expect you to do that. It wasn’t your fault. That 15 minutes. Got me, I can’t tell you how many 10s of 1000s of dollars worth of work. So, in my opinion, if it’s a relatively small fix, it might be small to us, but it might be huge to them because they don’t know. I’ve always gone and just done it. Why not? Now, are we gonna go and start patching up their roof? And like we use the boiler illustration? Probably not. And I’m not telling guys, you should do this or shouldn’t, I’ve always done it, it’s the best way to put your best foot forward with the client, the agent, everyone involved. It’s just easier that way. It’s done that 15 minutes saved me. I don’t know how many days and weeks of just craziness. Just fixing a pipe.

Beon D: I can imagine somebody taking notes, okay, you know, when this happens, do that, you know, or whatever. Really, what stands out to me is kind of just, that you’re dealing with human beings here. These people are stressed out. I mean, there’s an older guy. I mean, imagine how you would feel, you know, imagine that was your grandparent. And I think that’s what one wins out for you, in this case, is you weren’t looking at it as a calculated, what am I going to get out of this, I’m not gonna go over there, you know, whatever. He was like, man, here’s a stressed-out person. I did connect with him. Let me just go check it out. Maybe I can help him out. By doing it that way, it ended up being an amazing marketing piece of your business but you didn’t calculate that it was just being a good guy and doing the right thing. So I mean, obviously, there’s a line that one has to always respect but that’s sort of what shines through to me, you know?

Ian R: Well, and I’ll tell you, going back to that experience I had with the HVAC company on my own home, they responded right away, sent guys out, and fixed it. There was even an issue that came up after that. They apologized, they came out and fixed it. They talked with me, they listened to me, as I complained, even though they already knew what the problem was. You know what, I still use them today. I’ve always judged the company, not by the results the first time but by the results when you have a problem. That’s really where it counts. So sometimes just talking with a person making a site visit, just maybe making a repair, if it’s something within the scope of what we know how to do well. You know, not every home inspector, do we have a huge construction background? You know, we may not have fixed plumbing and things like that but do you have a little old lady who has a door that won’t close? Okay, maybe something shifted, can you tighten or loosen the hinge a little bit, that takes two minutes, and that’s gonna make that little old lady’s day she’s gonna love you for it. People just want to feel taken care of sometimes, in just small things.

Beon D: Now, I’m just thinking of a home inspector, by its very nature, usually an entrepreneur running your own business. There’s a lot vested in this, you think of all the effort you go through just to get your business out there, get everything rolling, get the jobs coming in. Once emotionally attached to your product, and what you’re doing. So when somebody complains, and let’s say it’s a legitimate complaint, it’s an issue with our service. It hurts. So how do we deal with that cuz we can get fixated on these issues, and you know, it can send us for a whole loop. How do we sort of balance out how we respond to complaints when they do happen?

Ian R: Yeah, you know, I’ve always hated and when people say you just need to separate yourself from your work. I can’t do that. I don’t know about any of you listening, but I can’t do that. What I do with my hands and my mind, just becomes part of me, for better or worse. You know, I can’t compartmentalize like that. I care about what I do. So when somebody complains, that’s the first feeling is, man, I stink, you know, but there’s a home inspector in the area that I’ve known for nearly two decades, and he’s recently retired. He would always have these little short, wise Clippy sayings. Two things that he would say is, that one out of 100 clients is a pain in the butt, not one client makes you forget the other 99. The other one was when we do have a complaint. It makes us forget that we didn’t have a complaint about the last 1000 inspections. It’s kind of funny how we fixate on one inspection. Wery likely, we couldn’t have seen what we didn’t see, we’re not going to purposely walk over to a big issue and say, I’m not going to write this down. There was probably something in the way, some other situation preventing you from completing the inspection fully. Or you know what, maybe you just had a bad day because you’re human. In reality, we can’t tie ourselves to the defects. We have to tie ourselves to the positive things, because for every complaint, if we did 500 inspections last year, and we had two complaints, we’re going to remember those two complaints, but not the 498 other customers who were like, that guy is awesome. So try to think about that, when we have a complaint, it was very much, probably not the reality of the situation. Most complaints I have found, I don’t know if I’ve ever had a legitimate complaint. I could understand their reasoning on it but not a legitimate complaint when you look at our SOP and what we actually did and what we reported on. “You should have marked this as a more severe defect.” Well, I can see why you might think that, but you paid me for my opinion. So tie ourselves to the happy clients that we have. Go back and sit and look through all of our nice reviews. Oh, man, that one person complained. But man, I have 500 Other great reviews. It’ll help us to balance ourselves out a little bit.

Beon D: Yeah, keep it in perspective That’s good advice. Now, a couple of times you have mentioned SOP and it’s just interesting to me because I think that’s probably a good point to remember, is to remember the actual scope of work that you are required to do, because, you know, we can take on a lot of extra stuff or you know, I don’t think home inspectors very rarely skimp on the SOP usually right, according to it. I think it’s probably earning in the other direction, and we can own stuff that really isn’t in our scope of what is expected of us.

Ian R: Yeah, one of the biggest complaints is mold. You know, a lot of home inspectors like oh, they complain because they move the fridge and there was mold behind the fridge. I don’t know of any SOP, not InterNACHI, ASHI, or any state that has mold in their SOP for home inspectors, do we agree to do a mold inspection? Then why are we owning that? Did we move the refrigerator out? Then why do we feel bad about that? So at the same time, sometimes it’s good to go back and look at those things. Look at what we were actually doing and what we could have done. Could we have done something differently? You know, some of the complaints we get can be coming from another source of faulty information. After we inspect, there are a lot of contractors that come in, I remember I was doing a home inspection and the septic guy came in and started tapping on all the pipes saying, Oh, this is all defective. This all needs to go. This is bad. I was just looking at the guy, I’m like, What in the world are you doing? You’re the septic guy. He’s talking about the wiring goes, Did your inspector check for copper to aluminum connections? I’m like, Are you? Are you serious? And I’m staying off in the corner. He didn’t see me and I looked at him. He’s like, Oh, and then he ran upstairs and went back outside the septic tank. Like what are you doing? This is why we have complaints afterward. I had one where they claimed that the HVAC company came in, the husband was away wife was home with a couple of kids. The HVAC company claimed that National Grid had tagged their heating unit for being dangerous. That they have to replace their heating unit according to National Grid. So after he replaced his Eddie had put in temporary heat replaced it. She calls me, upset. I’m like, okay, so run me through it all. She sent me the information. We talked through it. I’m like, did you call National Grid? long pause. I’m like, Hang on, I’ll call them for you. So I called National Grid and they sent a notice they’re like, We do not fail heating units. The only notice we have on this is the house was vacant. So we turn the gas off. Then when the house is reactivated. We turn the gas back on. and that’s it. She’s like, this makes so much sense. He told me there were flames shooting out of the bottom. I’m like, I hope so because the bottom is where your burner is. She’s like, No, no, there’s like flames shooting out the sides. I’m like, Did you see that? She goes, No, because this is what’s making me wonder. I went down there. He’s like, Well, I was doing it before but it’s not doing it now. I’m like, oh my goodness, and It really broke my heart. Because she started crying. It’s not like they, they bought a mansion. They bought something within their budget, which was relatively modest. Nice family, they got taken by the HVAC company. You know what, a lot of those complaints come from stuff like that. A lot of times, unfortunately, it’s HVAC companies that’ll say stuff like that. I had a guy on my heating unit, I have a boiler and telling stories now, Beon Welcome to Story Time in Inspector Toolbelt.

Beon D: Storytimes are good.

Ian R: Gather around children are going to tell you about a hydronic heating system that I have. But um, so it’s my heating system has a burn box in it. So the guy comes downstairs and he says, Hey, your heating unit needs to have a new burn chamber in there. Like, it does?. I just looked at that thing. I’m like, it doesn’t need it. So I’m like, can you show me because No, I can’t show you. Because if I do, it’s like looking into an arc welder. You’ll go blind. I’m like,

Beon D: You mean like you have many times because clearly, you’re suffering.

Ian R: I look at him funny and go, can you turn it off? Then you won’t be able to see him? Like, I have a flashlight. Do you have a flashlight? I’m being nice, because I’m like, maybe this kid doesn’t know he wasn’t a kid. It’s like 35 and so he goes, No, no, trust me. All your sock drawers are gonna get filled with soot and everything. If we don’t replace this, your sock drawers. Like this is a weird illustration. But I’m like, you do know I have a boiler Right? Like, how is that going to fill all of my sock drawers? is like, oh, boiler Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I go downstairs, and I look. I have what’s called a wet unit. So I tell him, I’m like, You do know that this is supposed to do this, and this and this, and this, and this. He looks at me because that was the first time I let him know that I knew something about my own heating unit. He literally grabbed his tools left with my doors open and drove out without saying a thing. So I called the company. I’m like, hey, you know, that was nice about it because I’m like, oh, maybe the kid just got scared. I’m like, again, he’s not a kid. But I’m like, maybe?

Beon D: He was behaving a bit like a kid. I will give that to you.

Ian R: But I remember calling the company and they’re like, “sir, we see here we have you on our do not service list. Please do not call here again.” I’m like, my wife even said she goes. I’ve never seen anybody being nicer to somebody when they’re trying to rip you off. I was I’m like, hey, you know, can we turn the flame off and I can look at it. Another heating company comes and goes, “Boy, that’s a nice looking heating unit.” I’m like anything wrong with the firebox? He goes no, that’s what’s supposed to be looking like.

Beon D: Isn’t that crazy? Yeah. Well, I mean, I’m glad he stuck to your sock drawer. If he crossed over to your pants drawer. It would have been a whole other story.

Ian R: Yeah, a whole other story. Hold on to the other analogy.

Beon D: Yeah, it’s crazy. But doesn’t it show? I mean, it is unfortunate that a lot of homeowners, everyone that there are people who try to take advantage of other people. When they meet somebody who’s just you know, honest to goodness, trying to help him out. It is refreshing, it does get noticed.

Ian R: Yeah. I’ll tell you, after all those stories and everything. Basically, what this comes down to is, first of all, be calm, really hard to get mad at a guy who was being calm. If we’re calm, things will work out better. Getting mad only ever makes a situation worse. That’s why I said wait, talk with the person, listen to the person, all that comes down to being calm and refreshing in the situation, cooling the fire down. We have been in business a long time, and we have dealt with complaints. We’ve never had any kind of serious issue. Don’t let the small complaints turn into big things. Go back, talk with people deal with them. If you want to have things on record, that’s fine if we’re really worried about all the legalese of stuff. Cool, but at the same time, you know, can you just fix that guy’s drain in 15 minutes? Can you pop the door back into the track with a screwdriver? You know, little things like that can really make a difference for a homeowner that is stressed, and frankly, if they’re upset about that they don’t know how to fix those things. Can we make their life a little bit better? Ultimately, it’s a great business. It really is.

Beon D: Looking at you know, maybe one thinks of past situations. Like Ian said, You all remember a bad review or a complaint from a customer. Instead of now, learning again from scratch on future ones, why not? You know, with this information freshly in mind, think back to those situations. Think back to ones that you know you could have handled better, and see where there was room to improve. If you do that exercise going forward, it’ll be a bit more automatic to have that proper response. I think that the first suggestion is a very good one. To sort of hold off on responding right away, wait until you’re in the right frame of mind, and that you have a plan of action, and not just randomly just call back and respond. However, you know, you wish so I think that’s very useful. Yeah.

Ian R: Plan for complaints, because it’s gonna happen. Again, perfect inspector. It’s still gonna happen to you. Yeah,

Beon D: That is true. Well, thanks a lot, Ian. Yeah, it’s been both informative and entertaining. We’ll catch you next week.

Ian R: Thank you Beon.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of inspector toolbelt talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at [email protected].

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