Scheduling customers

[Ron Nossaman]

At 10:30 PM 10/22/98 EDT, you wrote:
>I schedule customers 9:00, 11:00, 1:00 & 3:00 to allow time to do any extra
>work that needs to be done.  If all they need is a basic tuning then I get
>ahead of schedule & I'm early to my appointments.  Some customers seem to get
>offended if I show up early.  I could wait somewhere until the appointed time
>but this would be a waste of my time.  I'm interested in how much time the
>rest of you allow between tunings?  Thanks in advance from David Porter in St.
>Louis, MO
>

I schedule 8:30, 10:00, 11:30, 1:00, 2:30 when I know the pianos and the
people involved and have a pretty clear idea of what's going to be involved
with the tuning. A sawdust burger in the truck between stops constitutes
lunch, if I get any at all. With new, or habitually flaky customers, or
pianos with a known history of voicing or repair problems, I'll skip the
11:30 and schedule the first afternoon service at 12:30. This gives me a
'disaster reset' at mid-day so I can get back on schedule for the afternoon
and not unnecessarily offend any more people than necessary. My steady
customers realize, because I've explained it to them, that service work is a
scheduling crap shoot and the appointment times are approximate as a
consequence. My biggest problem seems to be getting people to hear and
understand the possibility that I may just as likely be early as late.
Often, if I'm 10 minutes early, I wait in the truck until they pull in the
driveway in a minor panic at EXACTLY the appointment time. When (not 'if')
I'm stood up for a scheduled appointment, I call the LAST scheduled customer
for the day (logistics allowing) to try to shoehorn her into the now
available slot. Sometimes I get lucky, she's home, and it works. This fills
the day without gaps and gets me home early and in the shop to fill out the
day without someone wasting any of it for me. I actually did this twice in
the same day once and got home from 3 tuned from 5 scheduled at about 1:00.
That's ONCE, it usually doesn't work that way and I get to do an hour's
reading at the cost of a tuning because the next scheduled customer isn't
home yet.

Now if I could just train myself to spend less time standing around
socializing after the bill is presented, I would have time to eat that
sawdust burger under a shade tree in the park. Ah well.

   
 Ron