Soft Skills

Customer Service: Before the Visit #2

Name: Customer Service: Before the Visit #2
Uploaded: 2025-04-10T15:28:28Z
Duration: 3 min 20 s
Description: Before the visit, confirm if someone needs to be home or if maintenance has permission to enter. Then verify the work order details—don't go in blind. Call or message the resident to clarify the issue so you can bring the right tools and parts. Check if special arrangements like water or power shutoff are needed. A little prep saves time and prevents multiple trips.

Before the visit, confirm if someone needs to be home or if maintenance has permission to enter. Then verify the work order details—don't go in blind. Call or message the resident to clarify the issue so you can bring the right tools and parts. Check if special arrangements like water or power shutoff are needed. A little prep saves time and prevents multiple trips.

Professionalism

Best Practices

Communication

Mark Sharp

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Transcript

The next thing you're gonna do is you're gonna confirm if someone needs to be home or needs to be present, or if maintenance has permission to enter. So those are the two things you're going to do regarding scheduling and communicating. You're gonna notify the resident in advance about the service date and time, and then you're gonna confirm if someone needs to be present

or if maintenance has permission to enter.

The second thing you're gonna

do before the visit is you're gonna verify the work order details. We have all gotten the service request, sink broke, toilet leaking, and we have no I Which toilet? What's leaking? Which sink? What? What? And you go into the apartment. With no other information other than sink broke, toilet leaking light out.

So do yourself a favor. Call the resident, review the issue or issues thoroughly to bring the right tools and the parts. Notify the resident because you're gonna call 'em ahead of time, right? Schedule the work and you're gonna say, Hey, Mr. Miss Resident. I noticed that you said your sink is broken. What is broken?

So you can prepare with the proper parts. Check if the problem requires special arrangements, like shutting off the water or the power. So you're going to verify the work order details before you go for the process of entering their home. Doing as much work ahead of time will save you time later. No one likes to prepare for something.

Then you get to the apartment and not, or, and you prepared incorrectly. So now you've gotta leave and you've gotta go back to the shop to get something else because you thought it was one thing. Just make a phone call, send an email, send a text. A lot of us have apps now on our phones. We can notify the resident, do that, get as much information as possible about the repair or about the request so that you can be prepared.

I remember I got a work order once. Light out, right? So I grabbed as many light bulbs as I thought it could be a regular incandescent, A an L-E-D-A-I. I didn't know which light, so I got a fluorescent, turned out that it was the fluorescent, but it wasn't the bulb, it was the ballast. So there was just a lot of multiple trips.

So had I gone through the, the process of notifying the resident at this time, we didn't have apps, so

I did what I

could. But you can alleviate a lot of those things by just calling the resident, notifying the resident ahead of time. Had I done that, I could have saved myself an extra 10 or 15 minutes.

But regardless, you want to review the issue or the issues thoroughly, so to make sure that you bring the right tools and parts, and then you're gonna check if the problem requires special arrangements. So that's part two. That is verifying the work

order details.