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

[Carl Teplitski]

When I was a very young man begining to service electronic instruments,
 I worked with an " older " tech. who had been into TV service , previous to
being hired by my co.  He warned me to be wary of clients who almost
begged you to look at an instrument nobody else seemed able to repair,
or even wanted to get involved with.  He said that it was probably a problem
not easily fixed, and once you got involved, you become married to it. 
Reason
for difficulty to repair it was probably because it was of poor quality, or 
there
were too many things wrong with it. Client , of course just wants it 
working,
and it doesn't have to be perfect, but soon as you start, now he wants more
and more done.  As you've already charged a fee for initial work, he didn't
expect to be charged again, and now he finds many things which he thought
would be done to start with.  There is no way you can remind him that he 
just
wanted  it working, not perfect. Very conveniently forgot the early 
conversation.
You end up doing much work gratis, just to get rid of him.  He finally lets 
you
off the hook, and seems  satisfied, and says that he will tell all his 
friends
what great work we do, and if he has anymore problems, will use our service 
again.
He called me later,  for work on his next problem, not related, and I 
politely told him
to go to someone else, because I couldn't afford to work for him. He was 
quite hurt,
and couldn't understand why. I heard that another tech. actually thru him 
out of his
shop after some dispute similar to mine.      Served him right, but he 
didn't get it.
Got to where nobody in the area would bother with him.  He had to send his 
work
out of town. I've had 2 or 3 of these types in 50 years of service and 
tuning, but I
remember them , because they effect you adversly, if you care .

Carl / Winnipeg.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Nereson" <da88ve at gmail.com>
To: <pianotech at ptg.org>
Sent: Saturday, November 21, 2009 5:50 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