National Clothesline

The following story shows what can happen when an insightful business owner figures out how to win customers by re-thinking what service really means. When he did, this young, plumber was able to grow his business from a single truck to what is now the largest residential plumbing company in Los Angeles.

When Mike Diamond started his business at age 19, he was a typical small-time plumber with a set of tools and a desire to make a living at something he was good at. But Mike became frustrated that his good work did not translate into increased business.

That’s when he first began to realize that there were two distinct elements in a customer ’s experience with a plumber. The first was the plumber’s technical ability to fix the problem; the second was how a plumber interacts with customers. He knew that just about every good plumber had the technical skills needed to fix a leaky pipe, so obviously an unclogged drain was not going to be the foundation on which to grow his business.

Customer satisfaction for any service provider should be looked at as both the tangible quality of the service provided and satisfaction with how the service is provided. For restaurants, it ’s the difference between how the meal tastes versus the service provided by the wait staff. For doctors, this can be thought of as the distinction between the medical outcome and the doctor ’s beside manner.

One evening, Mike was watching Saturday Night Live on television and seeing Dan Aykroyd bring the audience to tears showing off his “plumber’s smile” as he crawled beneath a sink. He noticed that this portrayal wasn’t just on Saturday Night Live — plumbers tended to be shown as ill-groomed Neanderthals whenever they appeared in a movie or television show.

This realization of how society viewed plumbers spelled opportunity for Mike. This was his epiphany. If all good plumbers could fix a leak, he had to have a different, even more important, differentiator. He thought about how plumbers had come to be perceived in society. If people assumed all plumbers possessed the same technical skills, a plumber ’s appearance and behavior might offer a significant competitive advantage.

In his own words: “When we were just a small plumbing company running a couple of trucks, I used to sit up at night and ask myself what I needed to do to grow my business. You have no idea how frustrating it is to do a perfect job fixing a leaking faucet or toilet and receive a mostly indifferent response. People expect plumbers to be able to fix leaks. And they ’re right! When it comes to technical competence you can pretty much throw a dart at the phone book and fine someone who can fix the majority of your plumbing problems.

“So I took a step back and began really listening to my customers to see what a plumber needed to do to get that ‘Wow!’ reaction, the type of experience that would get them to tell their neighbors about us. What we found was that people really noticed how service techs look when they come to their door (They notice when they come to your store, too!). People were frustrated that a lot of service technicians looked like they just walked through a sewer. Or worse, smelled like they just walked through a sewer. So the home owner is standing there thinking, ‘Great, now I’m stuck with this guy for the next two hours.’

“This is why we started our Smell Good campaign. We advertise that a Mike Diamond plumber will show up on time and smell good, or your service call is free. And we mean it. All our plumbers wear clean white shirts. They put on cloth booties before they enter your home and bring their own red carpet to place down in the home so they don ’t tract in dirt. They also bring their own towels to clean up afterwards. If our managers detect an odor in the morning when the plumbers arrive for their assignments, they send them home for a shower.

“The response has been astounding. We’ve become the largest residential plumbing contactor in Los Angeles, with more than 100 plumbers. We not only have high levels of repeat business, but we ’re now at the point where customer referrals are our single biggest source of new business. And we found another benefit we hadn ’t expected. The best plumbers in town now call us looking for a job because here they get a sense of pride they can ’t get with any other plumbing contractor. The key to this growth is that we listened to our customers and began to measure ourselves like they did: fixing the leak was the least important part of the service. ”

Mike Diamond’s story illustrates how service providers must satisfy their customers in two very distinct ways:

• Quality of the service performed.

• Experience of how the service is performed.

This is just as true for drycleaners. Considering that every employee is your company ’s representative will help you visualize the customer’s real experience with your business and how to improve that experience.