We live in a day and age where we can instantly send messages via numerous formats to other people. Text, email, instant messaging, phone calls, and voice messages cover most of the examples. We also live in a day and age where we can get much of what we want fairly immediately. In some cases, what we want can be delivered to our door in a matter of minutes. These two technological “advances” lead to what I have dubbed the Amazon Effect when it comes to dealing with service providers. It is easy to confuse getting a product that you want in a short period of time with immediately getting a needed service performed. It is important to remember that we are dealing with people on the other side of these communications and not a product being delivered to our door.
I try to make this distinction when I am dealing with service providers. Let’s take, for example, my auto mechanic. I trust my auto mechanic and I want to maintain this relationship. If he tells me something is wrong with my car, I do not question him because I trust his judgment and expertise. I do not want to try to find another auto mechanic because finding one you can trust is difficult. I realize my auto mechanic is a person with other responsibilities and interests in life than just my tiny fleet of cars. I realize that my mechanic has many other clients than just me. Although I possess a minuscule amount of knowledge concerning car repair, I make a concerted effort to shut my mouth and reveal how little I know to him.
There are a few rules I live by, mainly based upon common sense and courtesy, when I have a car problem and need to contact my auto mechanic.
- I do not contact (via any form of communication) my auto mechanic during non-business hours. If I do not know his exact business hours, I assume business hours are 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday excepting generally recognized holidays. I limit my contact to these times because I realize he is not on call 24/7 and I cannot afford to pay him enough to be on call 24/7.
- If I know he is on vacation during normal business times, I do not contact him. If I contact him and discover he is on vacation, I will apologize, tell him to enjoy his vacation, and call him back upon his return. After that, I end the phone call.
- I generally avoid contacting him first thing Monday morning because I know everybody else is contacting him first thing Monday morning with their “emergency”.
- I generally avoid contacting him during normal lunch hours as well.
- If I tell him a time when I am going to drop off or pick up my car, I stick to that time. If I cannot do so, I let him know of the delay.
- I do not randomly stop by and check on the progress of my car repair.
- I do not frequently contact him for updates on when my car will be ready.
- I pay him for his services immediately.
- I do not call, text and email consecutively and simultaneously.
- I do not call several times in rapid succession and refuse to leave a voicemail.FN1
- I do not send an email and then follow up with a text message asking if he received my email or telling him that I sent him an email (if I don’t trust email in the first place, why would I use it at all).
- If I have more than one phone number for him, I do not call one number and then the other number if he doesn’t pick up on the first call.
The last four rules are punishable by death if broken, or at least, termination of your cell phone/email provider account. If you do any of those last four things, you have communication issues.
It is tempting to justify contacting him because I am just sending a text or email and not making a phone call. Texts and emails are more benign forms of communication than an in-your-face phone call; therefore, we should be able to send texts and emails without using common sense and/or common courtesy, right?
I do not believe so.
Service providers are people who face the same challenges and obligations of life outside of work that all of us do. Several examples of such challenges and obligations include health care for themselves and their relatives, child care, child schooling, child raising, family obligations, home repair/maintenance, legal issues, financial issues, etc. It would be hard to create an exhaustive list of everything going on in someone else’s life, but it would be an easy task to list everything going on in your life and then consider that your service provider may have an equal or greater number of challenges, responsibilities, obligations, etc., in his life. From there, it is a small leap to easily see that my auto repair is insignificant to these other matters during these non-business hours.
With that in mind, I avoid the 2am email (with the hope that it will be the first email he sees upon waking up Monday morning) because I can’t get to sleep because my car wouldn’t start earlier that evening. I avoid the Friday night, Saturday or Sunday text because that’s probably the last thing he wants to see during the weekend (weekends are made for getting away from work and recharging the batteries, right?). I also realize that my weekend email more than likely gets buried by other emails he receives in the meantime, and, by the time, Monday morning rolls around, my communication is out of sight as it has been relegated to page two of his gmail account. I do not send emails or texts after 5 pm on weeknights because I realize he has a family and has family matters to attend to like dinner, school work, getting ready for tomorrow, etc.
I also avoid such communications during non-business hours because I realize they may have the opposite effect of what was intended. Instead of getting his attention, these communications may, more than likely, get put aside and forgotten because the weekend (or the evening) has been reserved for non-work-related matters.
What I realized and am trying to share is that service providers have a life outside of work too. Just because I have several means of relatively instantaneous communication available to me does not justify their indiscriminate use. I try to employ common sense, common courtesy and respect when communicating with service providers. Just because I can contact Amazon at any hour of the day and can get a dozen golf balls within two hours of when I want them does not create the same expectation for me when I’m dealing with my auto mechanic or other service providers.
Footnote 1 – I once had someone call me three times in rapid succession (actually this happens quite a bit) and refuse to leave a voicemail. The caller did not realize or refused to consider that I was, perhaps, already on an important phone call. Instead the caller interrupted that important call three separate times. It turns out that the caller was a Local Guide for Google, and Google had asked him to use my services and leave a review for me. Instead of leaving a voicemail following any one of his three calls, he left me a poor review on Google.
This is a perfect example of the Amazon Effect that I mention above. If this person did not get what he wanted immediately then I was at fault. He gave no consideration to the fact that I have other clients and other things to do. Also note that, more than likely, he was looking for a free phone consultation concerning a legal situation he had created in his mind that had no basis in reality just so he could tell Google he “used” my services and rate me based upon that “use”. This is the world we live in and this is why I put little credence in Google reviews or any other reviews, for that matter. Most of the reviews have no or little basis in reality.