Customer Service & Dispatching Alignment: Part 2
Does your customer service suffer when things get busy? Is your dispatch team constantly playing catch-up?
When dispatching is aligned with customer service, everything changes. The right tech shows up at the right time. Urgent calls get handled with care. Your team runs smoother—and your customers feel it.
In this week’s episode of Cracking the Code, Weldon Long talks shop with Gary Elekes and gives the tools you need to use your internal information alongside routing algorithms to dispatch with precision. With smart systems and the right people, urgency becomes your advantage, not your downfall.
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Audio Transcription (in beta, please be wary of typos)
00:00:00:00 – 00:00:08:25
On today’s show Customer Service and Dispatching part two.
00:00:08:27 – 00:00:30:08
Now, last week we started the two part series on customer service and dispatching. Today we’ll wrap that content up. So let’s join yours truly and Mr. Gary Alex right now. Take it away, Gary. This next point here, Gary. Alignment specifically with respect to the care of club agreement, customers talk about how that relates specifically to those customers. Yeah.
00:00:30:08 – 00:00:50:07
So I think even back to our question there about California, hey, we got spacing that’s occurring. If we have enough club customers, a thousand per million in revenue, 1500 is the target number is the KPI. That’s really where we want to live. What we have is we’re going to have lots of club game customers that we’d be running in California, right now when that’s occurring.
00:00:50:09 – 00:01:10:29
How do we sit down with the client, and make sure that they understand what’s going on with their total comfort system? And especially today with Serta, we got refrigerant changes that are staring at us. So we just did a webinar on that. So there’s a lot of, opportunity to sit down with the homeowner and have a conversation with them about what’s going on in their world.
00:01:11:01 – 00:01:38:03
Prepare them for what might need to be a replacement system. Our 410, a, our 22 is is pretty much gone. So as we start migrating away from those things, the conversations that we have, customers are key. The other part of that is accessories. Apps, cloud based technologies. We have so many cool products and services, but if we don’t have our technicians in a position where they have time to do it or they’re not asked to do it, we didn’t train on it.
00:01:38:06 – 00:02:05:18
Then what you end up with is you just running a lot of calls and your club agreement. Customers are not going to produce the revenue. So if everybody’s out there, I would love you to write down the revenue curve. Every club agreement should be producing $650 or greater annual revenue, not including the price of the club agreement. That’s not going to happen unless you’re doing number four properly, meaning that your customer interaction with you as a club agreement customer, Wally, that you’re feeling really great.
00:02:05:18 – 00:02:24:11
And if I talk to you about humidification, why is that good? So my sister is buying a new furnace up in Akron, Ohio. So she’s been, you know, connecting with the. So there’s a comfort advisor in the house yesterday, and she’s texting me now. The company advisor or guy. Yeah, exactly. But he was not an effective comfort advisor.
00:02:24:16 – 00:02:42:05
I’m not going to name the company, but he did. And when we were down, I. I told my sister, that’s all my sister. We’re done. This guy is not effective. Like, he might be a nice human being, but he is not good at his craft. Okay. Because I’m like, you need a humidifier. Okay. You’re going to put in a high efficiency furnace there.
00:02:42:05 – 00:03:00:00
You live in North Akron, Ohio. Winters are dry there. Okay? I was born there. I was raised there. It’s cold and it’s dry in the wintertime. You need a humidification system. So he didn’t even. He didn’t. He never talked to her about it. Okay. So let’s fast forward. Let’s say he sells. The furnace. Now she’s on the club.
00:03:00:02 – 00:03:20:08
The technician comes back later as a club member. That’s an opportunity. So you know. Hey, you know, Mrs. Alex, I noticed that you don’t have a humidification system. Tell me, how’s it going in your home, like in the wintertime? How do you feel? You know, so the ability to sit down and have a conversation with a client 650 or greater, she’s going to buy a humidifier from somebody.
00:03:20:09 – 00:03:36:15
She can buy it from him at the front, or she’ll buy it from the next company who promotes the service. Call later. And you talk again so much about alignment, generally in the culture. And also we just talked about number four there. But when we’re talking about prioritizing a call, VIP urgency list, there’s got to be alignment there.
00:03:36:15 – 00:03:51:27
Like everybody’s got to be on the same page. Talk about for a moment. So, you know, there’s there’s the old five season dispatching. But I think with AI right now where we at, Wally is that we’re going to be looking at the the AI functionality will probably code the calls for us. So based on what’s in the database.
00:03:51:29 – 00:04:12:27
So if it’s an older piece of equipment, we’ll look at that and say which technician can fix that particular piece of equipment. We’ll have that embedded inside of the software. Right. If we don’t we need skills chart. That’s pretty basic. But your skills chart becomes something that you put into the computer system. I will look at that and say, Gary can’t do V or VF, so don’t send him said Wally.
00:04:12:27 – 00:04:30:13
Wally can do that. Gary can do heat pumps. So great. Send Gary to this call. What we need, though, in the alignment side of the prioritization, is we need to be able to do two things. We need to be able to have the dispatcher look at that and say, Gary’s father is 95 years old and he is in a health condition.
00:04:30:16 – 00:04:48:15
So we’re going to override the the AI doesn’t know that. And so the dispatcher has to be able to go in and record that. The second thing we need to do is, you know, we need to create the urgency lest one of us and that’s a term, by the way, that, is, used by, Brigham Dickinson.
00:04:48:17 – 00:05:04:29
So the urgency list is where we don’t necessarily have the capability to get to that client. Right now. It’s a new customer. So I got club customers that are stacked. So I don’t want to lose the customer, but I’ll put them on the urgency list. And so if a gap occurs or somebody cancels, I’ll get out there and I can take care of that.
00:05:05:01 – 00:05:26:11
That’s a that’s a functionality. Again, I think I will be able to accomplish that over time. The third area, though would be red flag procedures, like we’re just not taking any new customers at this point. So a lot of companies don’t really have that idea. They’re just going to say, well, I want to grab every customer, but we’re going to figure it out and I’m going to work, my guys and gals until their bones break.
00:05:26:13 – 00:05:42:14
And and I don’t think that’s really going to work long term. I think that’s a bad culture for your team. So at some point we have to ask the question, when do we want to go into Red flag protocol? When our dispatch board is literally filled to the hilt and we have our club customers, we have to prioritize those first.
00:05:42:14 – 00:06:01:08
We have to prioritize the elderly health concerns and considerations, overrides with the dispatcher and customer service functionality to be able to go over top of the AI and recode. And then red flag is just we’re not taking any customers. I’ve been in Red flag about 4 or 5 times in the last ten years where we literally said to our team, we’re good.
00:06:01:08 – 00:06:17:13
Like we just have to tell customers we’re, we’re we’re crazy booked. We cannot get to you for several weeks. You really ought to call somebody else. It hurts to do that. But I’m more interested in my team and the health of the person that I’m about. I can’t have these guys work until 11 or 12:00 at night. They burn out.
00:06:17:17 – 00:06:34:07
Yeah, absolutely. And you kind of talked about this before, but just to recap it with this bullet point, the dispatcher alignment, trying to align the client need with the capacity of our technicians, our company to support that client. Any final thoughts on that? You kind of covered that, but just want to. Yeah, I think AI is is going to be doing that for us in the future.
00:06:34:09 – 00:06:52:00
I think asking going to look at the call, it’s going to look at the age of the equipment, it’s going to look at the technician skill sets, and it’s going to assign Gary to that call. And it’s going to be based on profitability. So Sarah already has that capability right now where the assignment of the call is based on the actual, profitability of that call.
00:06:52:08 – 00:07:15:06
So again, the dispatcher has to have the capabilities to override that. So if my 95 year old father, you know, has a has a trauma going on and he actually, you know, needs a repair to support, for example, you know, the ability to take care of his oxygen. His generator has a certain term to it. Let’s get out there so the dispatcher could override that and bump me off that call on to something else.
00:07:15:06 – 00:07:36:03
So that’s exactly where it’s going. Something we all struggle with, I’m sure can be frustrating for your technicians, for you, dispatching plans, routes and resources to appropriate calls. Talk about that for a moment. I again, I think we’re where we’re at today is, we have the ability to have GPS. Google is tied into most of our software systems.
00:07:36:06 – 00:07:54:25
When I was using success, where it was doing that sort of setting today, certainly, you know, most of the platforms today will allow the dispatching function and the dispatch board to be able to tie in. One of the interesting things is, though, when we do daily huddles, our technicians will say, you know, Google’s not always right.
00:07:54:26 – 00:08:21:25
And Google isn’t always right. Sometimes it’s not. So it’s pretty good. But at the end of the day, I’m always going to listen to my technicians. So as a dispatcher, I would encourage you in a huddle to ask that question. You know, are we giving you the right guidance in terms of route planning? Because the time that we spend in, especially if we’re on flat rate and residential, we’re billing a very minimal amount for the travel and the diagnostic fee in our company.
00:08:21:25 – 00:08:43:18
That’ll be $89, $49 for a club. So we’re not billing. You know, you said you were at 470 something out at 524. Those dollars are not being billed for the travel time. So it’s inefficient time. And we lose productivity as well. So we want to be sure that we understand traffic patterns. We want to understand where things are in construction.
00:08:43:20 – 00:09:06:25
Which is, you know, in Phoenix, Arizona, all year long. You go up north, you know, there’s two seasons, there’s winter and construction season. So just depends on where you are and location. But the smarter the technology is, I think the better. We have. An answer to number seven. And you talked about this about a skills chart and talking about understanding technician competencies and matching that up with the with the various calls.
00:09:06:27 – 00:09:25:03
I there was a question earlier. Two I I’ll come up real quick about, you know, where’s the best place to get this skills. This this list of property skills. Is there a software or is it just in the manual? You do know I’ve sent you a skills chart. You’ll get it in your material. That may not be definitive for your company.
00:09:25:03 – 00:09:48:04
For example, if you’re doing geothermal and you’re in the Midwest, you might want something that’s tied to that. But what I do is I give every technician a technical competency test, which is part of it’s out on AGI. It’s under human resources. It’s under technical training. And so it’s 150 questions, probably 151 questions. The last one says that, you know, the first thing you do is put your name on here.
00:09:48:04 – 00:10:07:20
If you didn’t, you fail. It’s one of those fun jokes. The the principle there is I’m not interested in, what they know. I’m interested in what they don’t know. So that we can create a development and training plan around that so we can build a group of technicians across the board that are very skilled across many, many disciplines.
00:10:07:22 – 00:10:24:16
Given that framework, what I need you to do then is transfer that into a skills chart, which is, you know, just a list of names with their capabilities, what they can actually service, what kind of things they can do, areas that they can’t do there, you know, sort of don’t send Gary to the RV. He’s not certified yet.
00:10:24:19 – 00:10:40:18
So Wally, at the end of the day, that’s kind of what we’re looking for is a list of names and a list of skill sets that the dispatcher and the customer service teams can look at, and that’s embedded in the software. That’s part of the software pack. And you’ve really I think you’ve made this point very clearly to us, this final, the number nine bullet point here.
00:10:40:20 – 00:11:01:22
How essential is that? The team, the dispatch, the dispatcher, management, everybody aligned on the goals and the need. Any final thoughts on that? Yeah, I think the main thing is, daily huddles, weekly manager meetings and conversations around the alignment, and input from the technicians on things that we’re doing to them that may not match the philosophies.
00:11:01:28 – 00:11:20:24
So as a business philosophy, Wally, I want to create space for my technicians, to make sure that they have time to talk to a customer about what’s going on with their total conference system. The house has an environmental envelope, the insulation, you know, humidification, DME, edification, accessories, indoor air quality, all that. That takes time. So there has to be some spacing.
00:11:20:24 – 00:11:44:14
There can’t be. Just go in, diagnose, fix it, and get the heck out. Unfortunately, that’s what a lot of companies do. So the conversation about client experience, culture, philosophy and then tactics are all the discussion about alignment. Hi I’m Darryl, you shensky I am Bob Larkin. Many of our contractors meet with us monthly and you chances are I’ve met with us monthly.
00:11:44:17 – 00:12:07:28
We found that members have deeper and greater needs. So we came up with next level coaching, which is we meet a lot more often and there is accountability to deal with some of the issues of money growth, finding employees, having an exit strategy to get off this roller coaster. These are the issues the contractors want answers to, and we can provide those answers at the next level.
00:12:07:28 – 00:12:33:09
Coaching. When you join next level coaching, you’re going to find solutions that are easy to implement and logical. Most importantly, we hold you accountable to specifics. We’re going to meet twice a month and have specific to do’s. And with those specific to do’s, we’re going to discuss and dive into your financials in a very granular way. You’re going to have a clear budget, will be able to establish pricing.
00:12:33:16 – 00:12:56:15
We’re going to help you create leadership programs to build your people. We’re going to help you find people. You may think of differing ways to engage employees that will keep them more involved by joining next level coaching. So if you’re interested in making more money, growing your company, finding good employees, and developing them as a strategy, give Dale on our call.
00:12:56:21 – 00:13:14:23
We’ll be happy to talk to you about next level coaching, and we’re going to see you on the next level as we move on. Kind of the next point, I know this is something that’s very important to all of us, and it’s something we all struggle with and that’s getting the right people. And in this section, Gary is going to talk about how important that culture fit is.
00:13:14:25 – 00:13:35:22
And you talked about ten attributes. Ten characteristics of that good culture fit. The first one here. People that are focused on the client experience talked about that for us. Yeah. So I basically told Jesse, Albornoz. Jesse, I need some of your DNA. I got to clone you. I need you, I need you in my organizations. I will train you on what to do.
00:13:35:22 – 00:13:54:29
But Jesse’s attitude and mindset is who we’re looking for. So, couple of thoughts here. I think what you want to do is you want to test people for that. How do we test people? Well, your interview questions and your scenario based questions are a key element of that. Most people don’t know how to interview. Well, unfortunately, what happens is we have an opportunity.
00:13:54:29 – 00:14:17:07
We got a job open. Somebody comes in, they actually show up, which is remarkable. They look the part. And so we’re looking at this and saying, well, gosh, I hope they have some technical competence. We ask them some technical questions, and the next thing you know, boom, you know, we hire them. So the problem with that is we didn’t really do a cultural assessment.
00:14:17:09 – 00:14:37:28
So the pain point in this situation is if we don’t hire them, that means probably I’m doing two jobs or somebody else is having to take care of workflow. And so there’s extra hours that are put in that. But I can assure you, hiring the wrong person to fit in the seat on the bus, ends up being a catastrophic problem.
00:14:37:28 – 00:15:10:17
Either they turn into a cancer or they’re not organizational fit. And we end up having to hire those. We call that blessing and releasing Wally. So we’re just going to go ahead and take care of that and move on. In your career, when we when we have that happen that’s disruptive. So the conversation I want to have with the team here that’s in my contract university land is, ask questions that are culture really organized and make scenarios happen and ask questions about how they would handle situations, how would they treat people?
00:15:10:19 – 00:15:33:00
They can lie to a certain degree, but they can’t lie all through the interview process. If we have questions that reinforce it. I’ll give you an example. I’m getting ready to hire a couple of people. They don’t know it, but I know it’s, my business partner knows it, and we’re going to hire them based on culture.
00:15:33:02 – 00:15:55:01
It’s not going to be based on, I didn’t do this dot dismiss dot on performance. It’s just not it’s not culture fit. And so we look back at that and, you know, we think we made a mistake. Like how did we how did we allow that to get through the net. And so we go back to our process and we just feel like we didn’t ask enough culture questions that we should have identified.
00:15:55:03 – 00:16:16:27
This person is not a good fit for us, you know, square peg, round hole kind of conversation. Yeah. So dispatchers and customer service representatives are front facing front alignment people, Jesse and the two young ladies that were, you know, at the front of Albornoz, they have to be, well ordered in terms of the skills here.
00:16:16:27 – 00:16:34:01
So part of that is they have to want to actually behave and that’s hard, Wally. That’s the hard part today is finding people that want to actually behave the way we want them to behave, as opposed to how they want to behave. You know, Gary talks so much about culture, not just to this event, but his larger trainings.
00:16:34:01 – 00:16:55:12
And, and it’s such an important part. One of the things I learned so much, Gary, is that there are a few, like, zero exceptions, zero tolerance violations of the culture. And the thing I remember a year or two ago, you had in one of your is a digital marketing agency, and one of the fundamental culture values that were broken was lying to you.
00:16:55:16 – 00:17:12:08
Yeah. And that was a zero tolerance. And I remember thinking, you know, that that must be hard because you told me at the time it was a person that you spent a lot of routines to do. People had a lot of money invested in, but you knew you had to do the right thing because there were zero tolerance as if you make that exception.
00:17:12:08 – 00:17:33:01
And we had a situation. We bought this company back in May and June, and their top performer, dude was a stud. Absolute rock star, right? Yeah. A service technician could sell anything. You sell systems. And, man, we just we we loved him. I was like, man, this is what it’s all about. And then we we found out he went out there to install after hours on and on one of our customers.
00:17:33:03 – 00:17:49:28
Right. And I remember having the conversation with my team manager team about, man, what what should we do? And I’m like, I’m thinking about that situation with you and those two folks. I’m like, this is a zero tolerance issue. We don’t have any choice, unfortunately. Same thing with stealing or lying to a customer. So he stole from you?
00:17:49:29 – 00:18:15:06
Yeah. That’s what he did. He stole from you. Absolutely. Now, organization skills, would you say on a scale of 1 to 10, those are important. They’re not important for a dispatcher. Very important. You know, for, a visionary. Not so important. So I had a conversation, a $25 million owner of a company, and he had his whole team on the call, and, he’s like, look, I’m a visionary, but I got all these people around me because I don’t do details very well.
00:18:15:10 – 00:18:32:25
I know that they know that, the responsibility here is, you know, their job is to make sure that I don’t do something stupid. So I think from a dispatching point of view, organization skills are crucial because we’re moving people around and we have to keep track of a lot of moving pieces. And so organization skills are fundamental.
00:18:33:02 – 00:18:52:09
I’m going to test that in my interview process. I’m going to give people organizational challenges and say, how would you deal with all of this and have them fit the pieces together? Well, that’s going to tell me how they’re thinking. Pattern works critically. It doesn’t mean they’re a good person or a bad person. It’s going to challenge their organizational capability.
00:18:52:11 – 00:19:10:02
Yeah, that’s that’s, I be curious. Maybe later on we can talk about what some of those, exercises are. How do you do that? Because it’s brilliant. Sense of urgency. I saw a video on social media yesterday before, and the guy said, losers are never urgent. Losers never have urgency. And I thought about men. How true is that?
00:19:10:06 – 00:19:28:13
Winners are always urgent. There’s a next thing we got to get done. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go talk to us about that sense of urgency with respect to the importance in a in a CSR to a dispatcher. Let’s do that tomorrow. Okay. I saw a T-shirt one time Procrastinators unite tomorrow. Yeah. We’ll talk about it later. Yeah.
00:19:28:15 – 00:19:47:28
So the, you know, sense of urgency is crucial for a dispatch function. Certainly there are times when urgency can get in the way of maybe thinking through details. But when we’re dealing with customers, when we’re dealing with a emergency driven business, Labor Day in business sense of urgency is key. We also need to give breaks to people that have sense for high sense of urgency.
00:19:47:28 – 00:20:06:27
People tend to be high strung, Type-A personalities, pretty competitive. So you want to make sure that went on vacation or on vacation and those types of things. So, sense of urgency key. You got the problem solving went up there too. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously they’re going to face challenges with getting the right people, the right call at the right time, the right place as efficiently as possible.
00:20:07:00 – 00:20:22:09
How important is it that they have this ability to, to solve problems, work things out? Well, I think back to the side fold episode where Jerry Seinfeld is renting a car and, he’s got the reservation. He’s there, and I’m here to pick up my car. She’s, you know, yes, I have a reservation. And he’s like, great.
00:20:22:09 – 00:20:38:20
I’d like to mid-size and, well, I’m sorry, we don’t have any midsize cars. And they go through little things, and he’s he’s. Well, you guys know how to take the reservation, but you don’t know how to hold the reservation. So that’s really the most important part. Yeah, I know exactly this thing you’re talking about is like, that’s the whole point of a reservation.
00:20:38:20 – 00:20:56:16
Yeah, it’s it’s reserved. So the problem solving side of that from a dispatching point of view is, you know, how do I get the customer to be satisfied with something that may not be the perfect conditions? I’ve got problems that are going to occur on a day to day basis. So people that think quickly on their feet, tend to be problem solvers.
00:20:56:21 – 00:21:20:21
And so I also think culturally you want to empower your people to solve problems. I think one of the challenges that I see in companies that begin to restrict their growth is they don’t transfer the ownership level DNA of philosophies into their personnel, meaning they don’t move that into their culture. So people that are downstream from an owner don’t have the authority to make decisions to solve problems.
00:21:20:23 – 00:21:42:07
Companies like Nordstrom’s, companies like Alb or not, they’re empowering their people to solve problems. So I think when we start thinking about dispatchers customer service, we don’t want to be involved. I don’t want to be involved in every detail. Right. I can’t possibly I just don’t have the physical means or the time to do it. So you got to teach your people how to be good problem solvers.
00:21:42:09 – 00:21:58:23
You got to empower them to be a problem solvers. You know, it’s amazing thinking about that story from the Dallas restaurant, the waiter and the chef. Like, they didn’t have to go to the owner and say, hey, can we cook Mexican food? This guy, he’s he’s kind of a he’s kind of a baller. They just dropped 5000 bucks tonight.
00:21:58:23 – 00:22:15:25
They’re probably dropped 50 bucks next time they come in. Because he loves good wine and good food. Good tequila. It’s good. Listen, travel with Gary is a whole different class. Reposado was what was coming, man. When I’m traveling by myself, Johnnie Walker Blue, I’m like eating room service and stuff. When I go, Gary is like, we’re balling, man.
00:22:15:25 – 00:22:31:26
We drink. Drinking the best wines. He knows all the great restaurants, but those people didn’t have to go get permission from their owner to do that for, you know, culturally they were aware that this is what they would want to happen to take care of a baller that comes in here. That’s going to be a $15 table on for people.
00:22:31:29 – 00:22:46:19
Yeah, I think at the end of the day, the culture of that organization is we want the customer to be happy and we don’t want you to go to another different restaurant. We want you to come back tomorrow. You’re here. They knew we were from out of town, so we had talked to the, you know, the bartender.
00:22:46:26 – 00:23:02:06
Where are you guys? Here? Well, we’re at a conference. What are you doing? What we’re teaching. Okay, so they knew they had us for 2 or 3 nights, right? So why not grab the ticket? And the answer, this is exactly the conversation about the humidifier with my sister. Why would you not present that to her? It’s the northern climate of Ohio.
00:23:02:06 – 00:23:25:16
It’s heating season. You’re putting in a dry air 90% furnace and 95%, carrier. That was what he was quoting. You didn’t give her the opportunities. Crazy. So when we’re talking about problem solving at the dispatch level, getting your best technicians positioned to be able to do the work is the key to the problem solving. Yeah, awesome content right there, as always.
00:23:25:16 – 00:24:04:10
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