Hi Everyone, You guys have raised great points, and I sure enjoy reading these posts. Since I use public transit, I tell a customer that I cannot guarantee an exact time but give them a half hour interval "Since I use public transit, I'll be there between 2 and 2:30. If my wife drives me, I put pressure on her to get the kids in the car so we can be there on time. Of course if I'm running late then no pressure. I was on my way to south Jersey to tune a piano, and my son had to make a pit stop. It's not easy to tell a 5 year old to wait. lol so I called the pastor and it turned out that he had a parishinor in the hospital so he had to reschedule anyway, but I called to let him know as was suggsted here that I would be a little later. As for answering machines and voice mails, I find that I'm wasting my time leaving messages. I tuned a piano for one person whom I know will let her machine go off and she'll then answer the call if she wants to talk to this person. Problem is, this is the only phone number I have, so I have to keep trying. I can't count how many messages I left in the past few weeks. Maybe one a week at least. For those of us with a small client base, it's hard to avoid stressing the importance of an appointment in six months etc. I'm depending on this income so when a call back or customer falls through, I unfortunately go through a period of self reflection which puts my poor wife in a ringer because I at times get depressed and don't feel like doing anything. I had a pastor today say they took care of the next tuning in house. I texed back "hopefully he's trained in this field." Where on earth did this new tuner come from? This is a church in the middle of no where practacally. So how do we then come across as if we don't care whether these people schedule? In my position, if I lose one customer it hurts. I lost three already, this church, a guy who sold his piano because he was moving, another person who moved and another who said that their kid lost interest in taking lessons. so theres $400 roughly I lost which could pay all kinds of bills. So how do we obtain a stable flow of things so that even when the slow times come we know we can keep moving, and if one drops off, we're not left trying to grab onto the furniture because our legs were kicked out from under us? As for no shows, hasn't happened to me yet fortunately. I'm thankful. Sorry for my rant. Marshall Marshall Gisondi Piano Technician Marshall's Piano Service pianotune05 at hotmail.com 215-510-9400 www.phillytuner.com Graduate of The School of Piano Technology for the Blind www.pianotuningschool.org Vancouver, WA -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20100818/2f0db842/attachment.htm>
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