Wisler Plumbing and Air

Serving Roanoke and surrounding areas.

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What Keeps me Up At Night?

Customer Service

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Our mission statement here—and my mission statement, really—is to honor God, serve people, be diligent, do quality work, and grow profitably. I want to extrapolate a couple of things from that statement: Serving people well, being diligent, and doing quality work are practices that are very important to me. The quality of the work we perform is just so important that I find myself thinking about it quite a bit. It bothers me greatly if we’ve done anything incorrectly in someone’s home.

Satisfaction hinges around making sure that we’ve put the right person at a customer’s home and trained them correctly. We also have to be certain we’ve done the best job we possibly could. If we’re not efficient, if we don’t get a call made when we should have, or if we don’t update the customer about their situation, we’ve failed. This is so important to me, this organization, and our team. It’s a huge concern whenever we miss the mark. Day-in and day-out, we strive to respond to those issues quickly and try to resolve them the right way, to make sure we regain our customers’ satisfaction moving forward.

The ‘grow profitably’ part of our mission statement means we need to make a profit to stay in business for our employees and our customers. However, there are isolated situations where that’s not possible. We actually think it’s more important to lose money if it means making sure a customer is satisfied. We have to step up to the plate and take ownership of certain mistakes. Even though it’s neither fun nor profitable, it’s the right thing to do. That goes back to the quality of service and work performed—there’s a balance between quality and profitability, and I’m not willing to sacrifice quality in the name of profit.

If you have any questions about your plumbing or HVAC systems and you want to work with a team who cares very much about your satisfaction, reach out to us today. Contact us online or give us a call at 540-483-9382.

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Satisfaction guarantee is such a broad term for a company to use, so I want to talk about what it means to me and give some concrete examples. We’re in the customer service business (which is also a very broad term). If one of our clients is dissatisfied because we’ve failed them in some way, or if we set an expectation that we didn’t live up to, it takes a lot of humility to acknowledge it and say, “We failed you and we’re sorry.”

We make mistakes even though we strive so hard for perfection. Our teams overlook things, which can be easy sometimes with everything that’s going on. The mistakes we make—or our inability to deliver an expectation that has been given—is going to cause dissatisfaction. We always welcome a client to let us know if they aren’t satisfied because we really want to step up to the plate and do the right thing. We make it a high priority to try to respond to the customer within a few hours of learning their concern.

Over the last 6 to 12 months there’s been a couple of areas in the teams where we’ve struggled. It’s happened due to many different reasons—we’ve had a really wet, rainy year, and we’ve also had some staffing challenges. That has led to us not meeting expectations, with excavation being one example. When we dig a hole or work in someone’s yard, not getting the compaction done causes the dirt to settle. Around a month after a job, the settled dirt can result in a low spot in someone’s yard. (That’s definitely very frustrating for a client.) The wet year has been challenging for us because it’s very hard to compact mud. We’ve had a couple of clients call in and say they weren’t happy with the end product. We had to go back out and make sure we got the yard up to an acceptable level.

When we do a job, we’re focused on doing it right for our clients (even if that means losing money). Many times, the measuring stick of the client’s satisfaction is the best way to determine whether or not we did do the job right. We started offering HVAC last year and we now have a full year under our belt. There were (and still are) definitely challenges around staffing and growth in that area. As we hire new employees to join the HVAC team, we’ll see mistakes happen simply because a new employee may not have the full experience we anticipated. If a diagnosis was made improperly and the client tells us something isn’t working, we try to get right back out there. If there’s any uncertainty, we’re going to go out and review any work that was done by that technician.

We don’t want to make any assumptions. In a couple of occasions we’ve had to take ownership of a mistake and go back over everything with a fine-toothed comb. We want to make sure we’re proactive because we definitely don’t want to be surprised three months down the road when an issue has been going on unresolved. Those visits to a home cost money and take away from other areas as well, but we do them in the name of customer satisfaction and making sure we’re taking care of our clients.

If you want to work with a team that truly stands behind the satisfaction guarantee, reach out to us today. Contact us online or give us a call at 540-483-9382.

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The most important thing for us to do as a company is make sure the right person goes to the right call. Everyone loses when that doesn’t happen. If we send a technician who doesn’t have the relevant competency out to someone’s home, they will be frustrated because they struggled to complete the task. The client is going to be very frustrated, too, because their concern was not efficiently resolved. Time is very important to everyone, so if we have to go back to do something twice, it’s absolutely no fun for anybody involved. We’re very much keyed-in to trying to get the right tech on the right job so these things don’t end up happening.

It can be very challenging to pull this off sometimes, though, because we may not fully understand the issue that we’re sending someone out for. Sometimes we’re making educated guesses about what potentially could be going on, so we have to compensate when we’re assigning the job to a technician. We also have a lot of technicians who specialize in a certain area. For instance, our plumbing technicians don’t cross over to HVAC and vice-versa. Our maintenance technicians specialize in maintenance and are not service technicians.

We always look at the skill level of the technician and the skill level required for the actual task being requested and try to match them up. That way we can divvy out jobs and tasks to the individuals who are specialized in those areas. If they do a specific kind of task day in and day out, they’re going to be much better at it than someone who might run three HVAC calls, four plumbing calls, and a couple of water treatment calls every week. If a technician was constantly doing different tasks, they’d never find a groove. We think the best strategy is to have specialties within our techs so we can field the right person for the job.

We also look at the priority of the call. For instance, no-heat calls and no-water calls are very important and generally are given a higher priority over a dripping sink faucet. We also give priority to our Diamond Club family members as one of the benefits of the program. When one of our Diamond Club family members calls in for service or maintenance, we try to give them priority over someone who isn’t a Diamond Club family member.

We have a role in our company that is entirely dedicated to dispatching technicians. Kresta is our dispatcher here, and she has a couple of people who back her up while she’s away. (She’s been with us for about 7 or 8 years now.) She’s very capable of getting a handle of any situation and knowing how to match a technician’s skillset with the task. The dispatcher’s role is ultimately to get the right call to the right tech as the calls come in.

If you have any questions, reach out to us today by giving us a call at 540-483-9382. You can also request an appointment online if you’d like to get a technician out to your home for plumbing or HVAC maintenance or repair.

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One of the most frustrating things for a homeowner is setting up an appointment for a service person to come to their home and they don’t show up, show up late, or don’t follow directions. We focus on being on time, and we give a two hour window in which we will arrive. We also try to notify people when we’re on our way. I really think meeting our client’s needs comes down to dispatching correctly. It’s important that the people fielding the customers’ requests are well-trained in asking the right questions so we best understand the issue you’re dealing with, how serious it is, and exactly what we need to do. Asking the right questions is vital to making sure someone’s needs are properly met.

Next, we need to make sure we send the right person to your home. We’re very much aware of how the technician we send could make or break the customer’s experience. (Nobody likes it when a technician seems incompetent or when it’s the first time they’ve ever seen the issue.) We assess the task that needs to be done and assign it a skill level. We also assign a skill level to every technician (because everyone is slightly different). Then we try to match up the right technician with the right task to make sure we’re sending a competent person to every home.

A lot of times people think that a company will dispatch its technicians to cover a certain radius. A technician in South Roanoke would just run all the calls in that area for the day, right? Well, not exactly. We do not focus primarily on the location of the call as much as we do the skill level necessary to do the job correctly and meet the customer’s needs. So we may have technicians passing each other by on the way to calls. This is all about making sure the customer has a satisfactory experience.

We make these choices when coordinating our technicians because our time is valuable and our homeowner’s time is valuable. We want to make sure that we’re doing our absolute best. Sometimes we do have to make multiple visits, and sometimes we don’t get everything quite right over the phone. But I’d like to think that the vast majority of the time we’re able to do it well and make sure that the customer’s problem is solved.

If you have any issues with your plumbing or HVAC systems, you can always reach out to the team at Wisler Plumbing. Just contact us today or give us a call at 540-483-9382.

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I don’t think anybody likes negative surprises. Unfortunately, businesses often surprise people by sneaking in fine print with extra fees. So many of us are wary of fine print that it’s not surprising to hear someone say they’ll wait around and see how much higher the invoice will be after all the extra fees are added in. We try to do business differently than that. The price we tell you it’s going to be is the price that you’re going to pay. We trademarked the term Straightforward Pricing because it signifies our strategy of being upfront with clients.

Sometimes companies justify misleading their clients by saying it’s just an expected way of doing business. They view a service charge as something everyone should already know about, and they won’t even mention explicitly. Well, maybe a homeowner doesn’t know they’re going to be charged a service fee because they’ve never had service personnel in their home.

Most of the time it’s already not a good day when you have to call the plumber. There’s a lot of anxiety involved when dealing with an unexpected situation in your home, like a flood, water leak, or even a complete lack of water. Do I have the money to pay for this? Can it get fixed? How long is it going to take? Are they going to do the right job? Am I going to be taken advantage of? So many questions cross a homeowner’s mind during a time like this. Being straightforward with something as important as pricing helps to lower anxiety. When you have a lower anxiety level about your current situation, I think you can make better decisions.

I also think that you can make the right choice when all the options are presented to you, especially when you know you can trust the bottom line. (We believe in giving options to empower the customer to make a decision.) That ties along with another part of what we do with our pricing structure: Straightforward Pricing is a form of task pricing, so we don’t charge by the hour. Instead, we charge by the task or job. Another way to set prices is by using time & material pricing. One of the downfalls of time & material pricing is that homeowners can be penalized if the technician isn’t very good. If the tech wasn’t prepared with the right parts, the homeowner would end up paying extra because the job took longer than necessary. That’s why I think task pricing is much more of a fair approach.

Without Straightforward Pricing or some other form of task pricing, there is no consistency. I think it’s very important for homeowners to feel like they’re not getting charged differently just because of their status, what their home looks like, or because of whichever technician they got on a particular day. I believe in consistency, and all the things we do with Straightforward Pricing helps to build the trust level of the people we serve.

In the trades that we’re in, we strongly believe in the fact that we shouldn’t give a ballpark price over the phone only to go to your home and find out it’s going to be double what we thought. Instead, just reach out to us by calling 540-483-9382 or requesting an appointment online. We can have one of our technicians or reps come to your home, evaluate the situation, and explain exactly what needs to be done. Then we’ll give you options with a Straightforward Price so you can select the best fit for you.

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You know the old adage, there’s more than one way to skin a cat? Everyone has their own way of doing things. When I talk about the Wisler way, I’m not saying it with arrogance, but as a way to describe our approach to getting things done. There are definitely many different perspectives and other successful ways for a business to function. The Wisler way is how I label what I’m about to share—these are some of the main things we’ve found to be helpful to our success.

First of all, we’re selective, meaning we focus on hiring the right people and making sure they’re a really good fit for our organization. More specifically, our organization is shaped by our customers’ needs. Customer feedback is what guides who we are and how we build our culture. Nobody likes the service personnel visiting their home to be rude, unknowledgeable, unable to get the job done right, disrespectful of their property, unable to be upfront, unfriendly, or unpleasant. We key in on these kinds of attributes because we know our customers need personnel who provide a high level of service. We fulfill those needs by by putting a strong focus on who we hire and how we hire. People’s homes are extremely precious—they hold the things that we find most dear, like our children and our parents. Anybody who steps foot in that environment needs to communicate safety, care, and respect. It takes a special person to be able to do that.

Next, we’ve found that people have to be trained, whether it’s from a technical standpoint or a professional standpoint. As we hire someone, we may find that they need training to improve specific skills (e.g., communication or service). Our organization is very much about growth and development, whether it pertains to the overall business or the individual. Someone may have the basic skills necessary to be a service technician or an administrative person within the business, but they can always develop various skills to become even better. That’s a big part of who we are.

Finally, because we fail a good bit, I think we need to focus on getting our work done right. (Perfectionism probably makes me a much harsher critic than most other people.) I do think there is a right and a wrong, and doing the right thing is important. It takes discipline and organization to get a clear view of the work you’ve done and then do the right thing, even if it’s not the easiest or most fun thing to do.

In summary, we focus on hiring the right people with the correct fit, we believe in personal growth and training people to obtain new skills, and we’re about being disciplined to do the right thing no matter what type of task it may be. If you have any questions, contact us today or give us a call at 540-483-9382.

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