[pianotech] call-backs you can't charge for

[Tom Servinsky]

No you can't deduct that from your taxes, but those are the type of 
situations which keeps you in business. It's call good old customer service, 
going the extra mile to keep someone happy. Something which is lacking in 
many business rules books these days.
Tom Servinsky
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Nereson" <da88ve at gmail.com>
To: <pianotech at ptg.org>
Sent: Saturday, November 21, 2009 6:50 AM
Subject: [pianotech] call-backs you can't charge for


>    A client called and said her daughter hears several buzzing notes.  I 
> just tuned it a few weeks ago and didn't hear any buzzing.  But I go to 
> check it out.  Client wasn't home --  forgot I was coming.  Fortunately 
> there was a housekeeper who let me in.  I play up and down the scale, and 
> sure enough, there's some buzzing underneath somewhere.  I open the bottom 
> panel and see two small, rusty woodscrews lodged between the plate and the 
> bottom board, one of them against the soundboard. I remove them, and, 
> "Presto!" -- no more buzzing.  (Why couldn't they have buzzed when I was 
> tuning a few weeks ago?)
>    Suddenly client shows up (was walking the dogs).  I show her the 
> screws, tell her there's no more buzzing, and she says, "Oh, thank you 
> soooo much!" in a tone that's so grateful I can tell she thinks I came to 
> remove the problem as a huge gratis favor, and that certainly I don't 
> intend to charge anything.  (When they say, "Do I owe you anything?" then 
> you KNOW you'd better say, "No, that's OK -- I was in the neighborhood" or 
> something similar.)
>       I spent a half-hour driving, two minutes finding the problem, ten 
> minutes waiting around for the client, and another half-hour back to the 
> shop -- 1 1/4 hours for no compensation. Sometimes you just get the "vibe" 
> from the client that they think any buzz, noise, tinnyness, or other quirk 
> that shows up within, say, a month after you tuned it, is your fault, 
> since it wasn't doing that before you tuned it, and therefore must've been 
> caused by your "tuning" and you should come fix it for free.
>    Oh sure, you can say, "I have a $xx minimum billing for service calls," 
> but then you lose the customer and any referrals from them.
>    I've even done 12 hours' extra labor on a large reconditioning job to 
> get rid of problems they implied were my fault, even though these things 
> were not in the job estimate, but from their tone of voice and attitude 
> you can tell that it's either fix everything for free or get into a big 
> argument, much unpleasantness, and maybe even a lawsuit.
>    But of course you can't deduct the value of your time on your tax 
> return, since the IRS doesn't see your time as being worth anything.
>    --David Nereson, RPT