RETA Breeze May-June 2022

SERVICE

The Shade Tree Mechanic volume XLXI

Customer Service Representatives!

cooling, we provide it. Therefore, they are our customer. We deal with customers all the time. If we don’t provide our service, the plant doesn’t run. We are a critical supplier to our company. So, we obviously provide service. We have customers (everyone in the facility that needs anything cold). We represent the maintenance department every time we leave the shop. Therefore, we are customer service representatives. So, does that mean we need to operate differently than other customer service representatives? Of course not. We need to learn to be a little more like them. A quick search of the internet gave me this definition for a customer service representative “interacts with customers to provide information in response to inquiries about products and services and to handle and resolve complaints.” Wow, that is exactly what we do in the maintenance department. We handle calls for equipment

Maybe we need to think about our role a little more. One thing that most customer service representatives do that we neglect on occasion is politely resolve situations, and calmly deal with customers. Polite and Calm, not the normal motto of the maintenance department, but it’s gonna be! The next time, the production manager is losing his mind because a piece of equipment is down, we need to: calmly interact with our customer, resolve the situation to the best of our ability, and assure the customer is satisfied with the resolution, if at all possible. Then I’m headin home and having a beer under my shade tree! The shade tree grows outside of the little town of Broughton, Ohio. Where everyone is always welcome, the beer is always cold, and something is always needin fixin.

Every once in awhile, the boys say something so crazy, I just bust-a-gut and walk out of the room. Most of the time, they’ just tryin to get my goat. But the other day, they was plum serious and had no idea why I was a laughin. Bobby was trying to find some information on a new oiler for a packaging machine. After spending 45 minutes on the phone. He hung up and said “Thank god, I’m not a customer service representative. I’d shoot myself”. I laughed so hard, tears were pouring from my eyes. Bobby looked over and said “What?” “Bobby, you are a customer service rep.” “Heck no, I’m a mechanic”. Well, that got me to thinking, Bobby really didn’t know. Bobby has been a customer service representative for years and doesn’t know it. That might be why he’s so bad at it. “Get off my a##, I’ll get to it when I can” is never an appropriate response to your customers. If that lady at the oiler company had said that, Bobby would have plum lost his mind. Don’t go takin me wrong Bobby is a great mechanic, if it can be fixed, he’ll fix it. But he tends to treat production as more of an annoyance than a customer. So when I stopped laughin, I began explainin. Everyone in maintenance is a customer service representative and we have a lot of customers. The freezer supervisor, dock supervisor, production supervisor, and the plant manager are all customers for the maintenance department. They need

failures. In fancy words we “respond to inquiries”. So when Jenny calls

and says “Hey why aren’t we cooling in Contherm #1?”. Jenny needs cooling therefore she is one of our customers. Jenny is

inquiring as to why there aint nothin cold comin out of Contherm #1. So when Bobby heads out to fix it, he is “responding to Jenny’s inquiry”. When Bobby fixes the Contherm, he is resolving Jenny’s complaint.

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