IN THIS WEEKS EPISODE, IAN SPEAKS WITH DAVID, ITB’S VERY OWN CUSTOMER SUPPORT SPECIALIST ABOUT WAYS TO KEEP YOUR CLIENTS HAPPY.
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
Ian R: Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk. Today we have the official IKEA representative here with us, the Swede himself, David Nyman. How are you, David?
David Nyman: Glad to be here. Ian. If you ever need help building a shelf, a bed, or a bookcase, I’ll be there.
Ian R: You know, I never understood the appeal of IKEA. It’s kinda like going to a restaurant and saying, Hey, I’d like a pizza and they hand you cheese one sliced pepperoni, you know, unmade dough, and get to make your own dough. Everything’s always a two-person job. Like, when was the last time you bought something from IKEA and it’s a one-person job?
David Nyman: You know, it’s funny. There actually is a restaurant like that I’ve been to, and I liked it a lot.
Ian R: I guess was a Swedish?
David Nyman: Oh, no, it wasn’t but it was pizza. Well, you had to tell the people what kind of toppings you wanted and pick the dough, pick the cheese, and then they baked it for you.
Ian R: So nothing like Ikea?
David Nyman: Lots like IKEA
Ian R: Oh, well, it’s great to have you back on as my co-host, David, always fun to have you. I think this is a very appropriate subject for you because, in one form or another, I think you have served in customer support for many years now. I’ve helped a lot of people. I said in the last podcast we did together that you were the most viewed photo of all of our Google Photos. Like if you search Inspector Toolbelt photos online, you pop up one of the first is that weird funny one with you in a rowboat. It just shows people are looking you up like people are looking up your name because they like you, we get lots of comments a matter of fact, we just posted in the inspector toolbelt Facebook group, a comment about, you know, customer support in general. They mentioned b&b and doesn’t count. You have a nice way of making people happy, and taking care of their issues. Just overall giving them a good customer experience. Not trying to blow up your head here. It’s too late. Now, there we go. It fits really well into this subject, how to keep our clients happy. I think as home inspectors, that’s one of the things that we worry about. We don’t want an unhappy client. We had a podcast not long ago about how to deal with an unhappy client, and what we can do, but how do we keep them from getting to that point in the first place? comes down to our day-to-day interactions with them and even our noninteractions with them?
David Nyman: Yeah, I mean, to be honest, that’s probably an issue in most businesses because you’ll find, whenever you look at online reviews of businesses, you’ll have some complaints about products but you know, customer service is usually one of the biggest complaints that you’ll find and a lot of it is because most companies don’t do customer service at all. You know, they have something automated and don’t even interact with their clients.
Ian R: Yeah, I think customer service comes down to an afterthought. It’s funny because like you said, most of the bad reviews that I ever see, or the bad experiences that I’ve had with a company came not down to you know what actually transpired, but the poor customer service. So instead of having it be an afterthought, it should be at the forefront of our business, it should be how do we take care of this? I know that, as a home inspector, I used to think, well, good customer service is a thorough inspection and thorough report, and I show up to the inspection on time. That’s what we do. That’s the basics of what we do. That’s not the basics of customer service.
David Nyman: Very true, it’s easy to mix those two up, I think. It comes down a lot to how you view your business because if you think about your business only as a way to make money, you know, you’re going to look at every way to make as much money as possible but that in turn does not necessarily lead to a successful business, you might turn away a lot of customers in the end, and you actually make less money with the view. If you think of your business as something that you want to succeed, it’s very important to keep your clients happy. That’s actually one of the most important things you can do.
Ian R: Yeah, and I think we can tie in some of these principles into keeping agents happy, too, when our client is happy, the agents that refer us are happy, or the search engine where they found us as happy when they leave us a nice review. It really should be the basics of what we do as a business. You know, for a lot of us as home inspectors were great home inspectors might have come out from the construction industry, and know a lot about a house and how to write a great report but some of the other business stuff like customer support may not cross our mind as readily. So anyways, that being said, what are some basics that we can do? We’re going to talk about a couple of those things. You brought up a nice point when we originally talked about this subject, David, don’t be all business. Can you tell us a little bit about why that’s important?
David Nyman: Yeah, I think it ties well into a previous episode we had talking to inspector media. They said, I think they said to humanize yourself so if you’re all business, you know, you want to be efficient, you want to make sure you get the job done right. It’s easy to actually ignore the needs of the client, you know, they might be standing there having a lot of questions, you know, wanting you to interact with them feel good about you coming there to look at the house that they’re thinking about buying but if you’re all business going in, okay, let’s get started. Let’s start inspecting this right here. You know, they feel like you’re just ignoring them. You’re not making them feel seen and heard at the inspection.
Ian R: You know, it’s funny, because I had a waiter recently, and I’m not a very interactive guy, when I’m just like, out by myself, I tend to like, Okay, I’m just gonna sit over here and, you know, eat my sandwich quietly in the corner. A waiter not long ago interacted with me. He noticed something about my shirt. He was very respectful. He said, Oh, hey, I’ve been there. Oh, cool. You know, he got a great tip, just for humanizing himself a little bit. It wasn’t just a cold experience of, yeah, he brought my food on time, I expected that he cleared my plate, I expected. It was just a little bit of human touch. I’m glad you mentioned that when we were talking about this subject because I used to do that all the time. I made it a regular practice, to find one point of common ground with my client, whether when they were initially scheduling or on the inspection. It wasn’t hard, because we’re inspecting in an area that we literally live in for most of us anyways, some of us have a giant service area. Oh, hey, you know, my aunt lived down the street. Oh, you know what, I remember replacing a heating unit with my uncle down the road. I mean, there were houses that I had actually worked on. I remember my brother owned a house and it was kind of a funny experience. They said, Oh, we remodeled the kitchen. Like, no, they didn’t. We did, like 10 years ago, you know, it was just kind of in everybody to kind of chuckled. They know they knew but just find a little point of connection. Talk about the area. Welcome them in. Hey, do you guys like to eat? You know, there’s a great restaurant down the road? Are we big outdoorsmen? If we are we’re probably living in an outdoorsy area likely talk about that, you know, oh, hey, do you like to bike? Oh, I mountain bike all the time. Now there’s a little connection. Really, it’s a lot harder to get mad at somebody that you now have a connection with.
David Nyman: Very true. It is important to just strike a nice balance there because it’s easy to slip over from the front nice and friendly inspector into the creepy stalker that knows your address.
Ian R: Yeah. Hey, so how much do you weigh?
David Nyman: Could you fit in one of these plastic bags?
Ian R: Too far? Not too far. No. But it’s true. We need to understand boundaries as well. If we’re talkative, and we’re used to saying things to people, and we have the personality where we can kind of get away with it. Cool, but it takes some self-awareness, you’re right, we do need to be very careful. So find some common ground, but don’t get overly personal. I will say still keep it professional. It’s very easy for people to take being nice and trying to get to know you, or at least a point about you. Hey, man, why are you hitting on my wife? Or what’s going on here? So we just understand boundaries but find I always tried to find one commonality. Over the years, I can only think of like two people that were like, I do not want to talk. Do your job. I heard you do good. Stop talking. Okay, cool. We’ll stop. Those kinds of people. They don’t worry about those commonalities. Anyways.
David Nyman: Yeah, if you learn to read a room, you won’t end up in a situation like it’s awkward or, maybe actually antagonized the client with too much talking.
Ian R: Yeah, well, but it is important for keeping our client happy, and the agent is going to be happy because when they see that we interact well with people, I think most of us have a little bit of trouble reading the room without realizing it. I know I do sometimes, like I walk into a room and like, Hey, Oh, that wasn’t the right situation to be like that. So that’s why maybe just pulling it back. I always like the geographic thing. Oh, hey, this is a nice neighborhood. You know, I drive by this all the time. Oh, my friends used to live down the road. you know, when it’s real, and it’s geographical, really hard to get offended by that.
David Nyman: No one can get offended by geographic geography. That’s my Swedish.
Ian R: The Swedish is coming out that Yeah. Another point that we had was to make people feel heard, and or special. I remember you telling me that one time because I’ll be honest with you if you’ve had a great experience with inspector toolbelt. You’ve likely talked with David or Kim, or Beon maybe even Chillway or some others that are on our team, or Kristine. If you’ve had a maybe not such a great experience, you’re probably talking to me. I am the worst customer service guy out there. You know, and David can attest to that. It’s just not my forte, I’m good at making people happy.
David Nyman: You’re a nice guy.
Ian R: It just comes off the wrong way. I don’t come off the right way online. I remember you telling me one time to make people feel heard and special. I didn’t understand that at first. But when I contact customer support, I want to feel like okay, yeah, that’s a good point. Let me look that up. I don’t want the standard, you know, blank message, here are three articles that talked about your possible issue or something like that. And feeling special part, I didn’t understand that either. But as I thought about it, you want to make me feel like you matter. You’re not just a number, you’re not just a user. And if you’re gone, and that’s it. So when people call us as home inspectors, a lot of times, they’re like, this guy’s just gonna blow me off. This guy’s you know, he’s just trying to be a jury, they can have their own perception of things. If we listen, what are you saying, okay? Or if they tell us, hey, I have these five concerns about this house, and then we go to inspect it. And we wrote down those five concerns. They feel heard, and they feel special like I matter, I’m not just you know, a blip in this guy’s daily routine.
David Nyman: Yeah, especially I think, on our part, you know, it’s probably a bit different than the in the home inspector field. But when you’re supporting someone in software, it’s easy to say, I always joke about this, that every time someone calls me, and I’m like it’s user, it’s always wrong. But if they’re expecting that from you, and they get a quick brush-off, look at this article, it’s your fault, they’re not going to have a good experience. Instead, if you listen to them, you also realize this is their business, this is something that actually is hurting your business. So we should fix it as soon as possible. In a home inspection situation, you know, this is their house, they’re spending a lot of money on it, they don’t want you to brush them off, if they have a concern, even if you know, they’re pointing something out that you know, it’s not a problem. So cheap fix, you can go to Home Depot and buy something for $2 and the problem is gone. Well, if you’re just brushing off saying that’s not a problem, then I kind of feel heard or special instead is gonna feel like you know, he doesn’t care about my future investment.
Ian R: I think that’s a good example, I think that’s where I sometimes failed to listen to my clients is, hey, the paint’s peeling over on this on this exterior wall, hey, there’s a tuckpoint repair that needs to happen over here. They’re pointing out 800 things that are really not that big of a deal. I know that but they don’t know that yet and that’s really what they want, they want to be heard. Oftentimes, I found eventually, in my career, if I let them go through that list, addressed the finer points, and say, hey, if I find out a major issue with any of those things that you brought out, I’m going to be sure to point that out. Let’s look, we’re going to look at all of them together, they felt good, just being able to go through their list ends and spit it all out, and let everybody hear it. You know, it can be a little bit hard, especially if we have a tighter schedule. You know, if we’re two hours on an inspection, and we need to get in, we need to get out of there. You know, they’re taking three hours, but that’s our job, we’re gonna have a customer, we’re gonna have to go back and listen to the podcast on how to deal with an angry customer, rather than having a good customer experience. So that’s where it changes our mentality. We’re not there just to do an inspection. There’s a human being involved. So can we listen to them? I think, making me feel special is different. I think it makes them feel like they matter because they do. They’re not just to paycheck, they matter. Yeah. I think one of the hardest things to do, though, is to not ignore difficult clients. I think that’s where a lot of us falter.
David Nyman: Yeah, that is true. If I go back to in my line of work with software support, if you have an issue that is out of your control, not something that I can fix on my own, but I can only pass it on to our support devs. I have someone who’s asking me about, you know, progress on that. It’s easy to just, well, it’s not my problem, I passed it on already but instead understand their concern with it, and explain to them what’s going on and why it’s taking time. You know, a lot of times that works a lot better than just ignoring them and saying, you know, the problem will be fixed when it’s fixed. So maybe you can figure out how to translate that into a home inspection situation.
Ian R: No, it translates very well into a home inspection situation. A lot of times. We have a client that’s a little bit more demanding on our time. They’ll call us and they’ll ask us lots of questions still. They may even sound like they’re contesting our report. Well, why didn’t you make a bigger deal out of this? Why isn’t this in here? Why isn’t that written in a different way? If we ignore them, it tends to build up over time but instead, I like to allocate the time. So if they call, and I know they have a list of questions, and it’s the second time they’ve called, I’m going to be available between four and 430 between those timeframes. If you call them and I can answer your questions, then they call, and then they call a third time. I can be available on Wednesday between 1030 and 11 am. I allocate the time when I know it’s not going to interfere with them or anything else. I say that because if we just start answering every time a difficult time calls it’s going to wear on us. We say difficult. They’re not always difficult. They don’t know people don’t call up saying I’m going to be difficult. They don’t know. They just have questions. But a lot of times, they’re like, Thank you for carving out the time in your busy schedule for answering the questions. I know I’ve been a lot. Yeah, we’re not talking about dealing with a bad client, just a difficult one that has a lot of questions.
David Nyman: I think doing it that way to build on that really does probably save you time because that makes them now prioritize. Okay, I had 50 questions, but these are the things I’m really concerned about. The other things are just fluff, things that I might need help with but it’s not really going to be a valuable use of those 30 minutes, I got allocated. So it’s a win-win situation that way.
Ian R: Yeah. A little pro tip for you inspectors out there, if you’ve never done this, clients will call me with a list of 50 questions like David just said, I never answered those questions right away, because about half of them are basically just a quick Google search. Like, hey, you’re citing needs to get replaced on this site? Our question is, how much does this siding cost? Is it easy to match it? Okay, you could just look on homedepot.com and find out how much the siding is going to cost approximately. So I always tell them, Okay, let me give you a call later this evening, or this afternoon, tomorrow, make an appointment with a set timeframe. Then like David said, by the time they get there, half their questions are gone anyways, because he didn’t either prioritize them or answered a lot of them anyways. So if we get a little bit irritated by, by that good customer service, is basically not ignoring them having good communication. I’ll tell you what, the agents love that I’ve had a lot of agents say you handled them beautifully. The downside to that is now whenever they had a difficult client we sent them to me. But at the same time, you know, hey, it was a great little feather in my cap of good customer service. That comes also comes down to good and quick communication. That is highly important. I think that is probably the most important thing when it comes to good customer service. Would you say that, David?
David Nyman: Yeah, I believe we have a full podcast on that one, too. It’s like a bunch of different subjects that come together in this episode. Really, when someone is waiting for you to get back to them, if they were a little bit irritating at the beginning, after a day or two get more and more irritated. Especially if they have to keep hounding you instead of getting a reply to their email or their phone calls. So being quick getting back to them, of course, as you said, we don’t want to give them all our time and energy, because that’s going to wear us out but even if we don’t have the time to talk to them right now, just shoot back, I would love to help you out with that. Here’s my time. So perfect response.
Ian R: Yeah. So David makes a good point, because it’s quick communication, that does not mean we are always available. So take a look at what times were actually available. I never liked to hear a home inspector say, Call me anytime 24/7. They want to make themselves sound very available. The problem is you’re going to be eating dinner at some point, you’re going to be at your kid’s softball game, you’re going to be sleeping, and people are going to be calling you. I made that mistake early on and people would just call me at nine o’clock at night. 10 o’clock at night. 11 o’clock at night. Hey, just a real quick question. Or hey, can I schedule an inspection? So it got to be a lot. So what I did was I said, I’m available from this time in the morning till this time in the evening and for me, it was like eight to six. So people knew that they could contact me between those times. They would get a very quick response either, like you said, just a quick text message. Hey, I’ll call you back in about one hour does that work? We don’t have to have the whole conversation right there. If we use a call center or something it actually makes a little bit better because they can take care of that quick communication, send us a message, and then we can get to him. But if not, a quick text message works really great. But now if we answer the phone say they call at eight o’clock, or seven o’clock and we happen to be available. They’ve already had the expectation set that they’re not going to answer the phone. So now if you are available and the answer. They are just over the moon happy. Oh, I thought you weren’t available after six? Well, I had a moment I wanted to answer your call. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t something overly important. How can I help you? If they were looking for a home inspector, you just scheduled that inspection right there? Yeah. Whereas if they knew you’d be available at seven, and he didn’t answer, then you lost it.
David Nyman: Exactly. I think that goes into another point that we’re talking about setting reasonable expectations for people, but then going above and beyond when you can. So like you said, having a set time that was available, but then whenever we pick up outside of those times, people are going to be impressed with us. We’ve seen that many times on our website because we do offer, you know, eight to five messaging on our website. We’ll respond to emails at all times a day if we’re available. Many times our clients come back to us and say, you know, so nice of you to answer on your time off. And it is actually our time off. So we’re not lying to you.
Ian R: Yeah, and that’s a really good point, too, because it is actually our time off. I was answering messages from a client who had an emergency. It really wasn’t an emergency, but it was important to him at the time. It was Sunday evening, 9 pm, and his email back where I just realized that it’s Sunday at 9 pm and you guys are helping me I’m like, Yeah, you needed help. Think about that, as it applies to the home inspection industry. If we said we’re available Sunday at 9 pm and they’re calling us it’s different than if we’re not open at 9 pm on Sunday, and then they message us. So it’s setting reasonable expectations, and then exceeding them when we can. Reasonable is not Oh, I don’t answer my phone calls. Leave a message and I’ll call you back. I don’t answer the phone ever. You know, we have to be reasonable both ways. Exactly. There’s actually a home inspector in my market. We’re going to have him on here, the show is actually here in a little bit. He has a nice auto-responder on his text messages and his emails. So when you call him, you’ll get either a voicemail or an auto-response from his text message and he says, I answer my phone calls voicemails, emails, etc. Between these times during the day. I’ll get back to those times. He always does. It kind of blows my mind. I’m like, you’ve never missed a message. I don’t know how you do that. I thought that was a nice way of managing my expectations. For him, he has a second career. So he can’t answer the phone at certain times. So I don’t recommend doing that in general. No, no. It’s actually an engineer. He works in a nuclear power plant, nuclear power plant but he would call me back sometimes outside of those hours that he mentioned. I remember feeling special. I’m like, Oh, hey, he cares about me like, Yeah, this is an important call.
David Nyman: You are special, Ian.
Ian R: Thank you, David. That’s weird.
David Nyman: I’m not cutting it out.
Ian R: All right, well, good communication also comes down to automation, too. We’ve all probably had a bad experience scheduling, where people got the dates or times wrong and because we are the originator of that schedule, they scheduled with us whether or not they got the time wrong, doesn’t matter, because they assume that it’s our fault. So good communication comes down to automation, and that, you know, like our app, set notifications up. So I have a setup. As soon as you schedule, here’s an email, sign your agreement, and here’s your invoice. Here’s a reminder, a couple of days before, a couple of hours before the inspection, the buyers, the selling agent, and the buying agent, all get a quick text message saying, Hey, we’re going to be at this address at this time. Just a quick reminder. Afterward a thank you note, all this communication happens automatically. I get a lot of thank yous from agents, they’re like, Oh, you’re such a good communicator. I set it up once and forgot about it.
David Nyman: You’re like, I don’t even know who you are.
Ian R: You know, it’s like my dentist. They do that too and I love it. I just feel like they’re great communicators, and they’re not really communicating because it’s all automated.
David Nyman: Yeah, that’s true. That’s what we recommend when people first set up their inspector tool belt account. Try it out, as if you’re a client, go through the whole process, and keep an eye out for those emails, see how they sound because you can tweak those in many ways. So if you make sure that you know that the emails are coming at the right times for you and worded the right way, the clients, won’t even know that you’re just letting a program take care of it for you.
Ian R: Yeah, and that’s a good point. Send the messages to somebody else to like ask your cousin or somebody say, Hey, can I just schedule an inspection? Over the course of the next two weeks, just let me know how everything sounds. They may email you back and say, Hey, Buddy did you check your grammar, or, you know this, this was a little bit of a long text message, can you just give me the date time, and address and call it a day? Short, sweet messages, but get somebody else to look at them? Because sometimes we get stuck in our own heads as to what sounds good and what doesn’t. Yeah, it’s very true. So another thing, and I guess this will be another plug for inspector toolbelt. Be on time be not on time, be timely, with our reports, there’s a difference between being on time with our reports, and being timely with our reports. So we may be listening to this and saying, Oh, I’m very timely with my reports. What would you say is a timely timeframe? David, if you were getting a report today?
David Nyman: I mean, especially in today’s housing market, you know, next day would be the latest, I’d say. But the sooner the better. You know, a lot of times, there’ll be several offers on the same house. You’ll be the one sitting there waiting for your report, you’re not gonna be happy.
Ian R: Yeah, so we may say a good report takes time and that’s true. Can we schedule more time during the day to get the inspections done? The next day, I had people complain about the next day’s inspection reports. When I first started my career, oh, my goodness, you’re getting reports within 24 hours. That’s amazing. Now it’s like 24 hours really? It? Can you do it on-site? Or can you read the report before you get here practically? That’s what people expect now. So like you said, you’re a buyer, you’re waiting for your report. This is the DoorDash generation, the generation where we click on something and it happens. So now they’re waiting, the end of the day comes, they’re waiting late at night. And we’re thinking, this is the best report ever. We’re putting the finishing touches on it and making it look awesome. That’s great but that customer is getting a little bit more irritated every moment that passes by. So we kind of have to think from their perspective. So being timely with our reports, don’t rush. We do not want to rush reports because the end product is that’s our end product. That’s what we need to have to look good and be completely accurate. But are we writing our inspection reports in a Word document? I think it’s kind of funny when somebody posts on one of the Facebook groups, hey, what software are you using? Somebody says, you know, Word documents, I saw this one guy advertising? Hey, I’ll share my Word document with everybody. You can use a free report. It’s like, okay, well, that’s your gig. Cool, but is that really gonna get your report done in a timely manner? Yeah.
David Nyman: That’s true. You have a good word template, I mean, still, you’re gonna need to put all the pictures in the right spot, you’re gonna have to make sure your texts because I mean, sure you can. You can write in your Word document on your phone but anyone that’s ever used the Office Suite on a mobile device. They know how terrible that is. Typing and trying to insert text in the right spots. So using a good app, like, you know, no names mentioned, but a really good inspection app can really make a big difference.
Ian R: Oh, come on. It’s literally in the title of our show. There are a couple of things we can do to make our reports more time as well. We’re actually planning a whole podcast on how to make your inspections go more efficiently. We don’t want to say faster. We want to say more efficiently. A couple of things have good canned comments. So you write a comment more than once. You’ve written it one too many times. Right at once. If you think you’ll ever use it again, save that comment. Now you won’t have to write it again. So have good canned comments, as canned comments, or just saved comments within your templates are within your comment library that you can just click and go. So I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written, you know, suspicious looking more like substance in the attic, blah, blah, blah. Here are all the disclaimers here. Why write that? 1000 times right at once. That sounds good and then added to your library. Take pictures as you go. I know a lot of guys don’t like to do this. They’re like, I like to take my camera and add the pictures later. I like to look at them one by one. I used to do that. I’ll tell you it’s fairly inefficient. Because now you’re rifling through photos. Then sometimes you’re taking photos of things. You’re like, Ah, dude, what is that?
David Nyman: Doesn’t even look like anything. It doesn’t look like anything.
Ian R: Like it was was I in the attic is that the rim joists? I don’t understand what I’m looking at here. So take pictures as you go in the categories that you’re taking pictures of. So are you in the basement looking at the rim joist? Pop? That picture goes right into that area. Are you going to put annotations on it later? put annotations on it now, why open that twice? So if you’re doing that, you’re opening everything twice. So report writing time on site can take 40 minutes out of our, you know, two-and-a-half-hour inspection, hypothetically. Now if we do that twice, we turned that into an hour and 20 minutes. Yeah, exactly. So being efficient will help. So pictures as we go annotations as we go, canned comments. We can’t help it. We’re gonna run with some custom stuff. You know.
David Nyman: I feel like you have to insert a disclaimer here, though, I wouldn’t have an idea what a written test looks like, even if I had context.
Ian R: Apparently, I didn’t either when I was looking at some of those pictures, or in the report, that rim joist is just a framing member on the outside of the flooring structure. Well, thank you. Now Now we’re getting a little bit more technical. What else do you want to know about a house, David?
David Nyman: What’s a sump pump? No, I know that one.
Ian R: It pumps the sump. That’s what it is but being a little bit more efficient can help us. Being timely with our reports. Now this point goes out to all of you who may be listening, that still send their reports days later, I just drew a line in the sand from the next day even is becoming too late for a lot of buyers. Same-day reports are expected now. I still know inspectors, five business days later, the person gets their report. That is not a great way to make or keep our clients happy.
David Nyman: Our house is already gone.
Ian R: Or their contingencies up. Now people are upset. We could have written the best inspection report ever, but they’re not happy. So that’s where it comes back down to customer service is what makes people happy. They expect a good end product. I expect to go to a restaurant and have a good meal today, but when the waiter or waitress is extra nice, extra helpful. Man, I’m just over the moon happy. I could have even had a bad meal. And I’d be like, You know what they were that was good service and matter of fact, we just had dinner not long ago. I remember my wife saying that was good service. We didn’t even talk about the food. That was great service.
David Nyman: Oh, it’s true. So because in reality, I mean, it’s a restaurant, you’re paying for the service. The waiter can’t really help with the food. Yeah, exactly. Gonna make it worse, but they can’t help.
Ian R: So keeping and making our clients happy, come down to having a business mentality. We don’t need to be sales mini like I’m, I’m just a natural, I just kind of go out there and I, I could sell, you know, snow to an Eskimo. We don’t have to be that way. We can just make a small connection with people. Make sure that they feel that they matter. Even if we’re not interested or think that they’re wrong. Listen, and give them exactly what they are what they’re expecting. They may not know what they’re expecting, but do they want they need a timely report? Oh, yeah. You know, we’ll get your report by the end of the day today or this evening. You know, be good. Well, communication. Do they know that the inspection was happening in an hour? Did you send them a reminder? Did you take care of those things? Having that in place is not that hard but it’s critical to a business.
David Nyman: Yeah, definitely.
Ian R: Well, David, do you have any more words of wisdom for us on making clients happy?
David Nyman: No, I feel like as long as you really care about them. I mean, I know that’s cheesy to say. I tried, I tried to, you know, when I talked to someone, he’s a home inspector, I call him with problems. Like I tried to like understand their viewpoint, just feel like you know, I really feel like you deserve, have this working, and then do my best to actually fulfill those promises.
Ian R: I think that’s a good way to say it. It does sound cheesy, but it’s true. We’ve actually said this in the podcast before. When you really care about what you do and care about people, you do a great inspection. It can be a little bit emotionally exhausting sometimes but it’s what we do for a living. It’s our business. We’re home inspectors, we need to have a passion for it. Jay, when on the show said he worries about home inspectors that don’t have a passion for their business and don’t have passion for what we do. We’re a critical step in people’s lives. So if we have passion for it, it’ll make it a lot easier to say these people are important to me. I’m going to help them. Well, thank you for helping us with the discussion today. David, it was great to have you back on the show. We’ll have to have you on some time when we need some advice on putting Ikea furniture together.
David Nyman: Don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on how to put Ikea furniture together. I have it’s all the word spoken word no pictures.
Ian R: Yet that to people to listen to.
David Nyman: Yes, exactly.
Ian R: Well thanks a lot again!
David Nyman: Thanks!
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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