Get Your (SERVICE) Priorities Straight!

We recently held a Service Meeting which was a great opportunity to bring the entire team together, where we reviewed customer service expectations. We also introduced our newest team member, Tony Esquiro. WELCOME TONY! Tony joins Washington Elevator as one of our North route service mechanics. You can learn more about Tony in our coming series, “Meet the Mechanics”. We ended our service meeting with a technical training session, led by the one and only Ben Campbell.

SERVICE MEETING. This was a chance to remind everyone why we’re here. As you know, Washington Elevator was founded to challenge our industry to be better, focusing on the customer and their experience. We hold ourselves to a high standard. Here is what we discussed.

• Mechanic Priorities. Our mechanics have many obligations. They are pulled in many different directions. When deciding where to focus their energy, they will address these items in order of priority:

  1. ENTRAPMENTS Entrapments are always an “all hands-on deck” situation. It doesn’t matter what job or “department” you may be working in that day. We’re all a team and must respond quickly to urgent requests.

  2. DOWN UNITS We should respond to all service calls the same day. If we need to leave an elevator down for further troubleshooting or repairs, we must communicate the next steps required to our customer and do our best to return it to service as quickly as possible.

  3. ANNUAL TESTING An elevator should never be written up on an Inspection Report for past due testing. Every test has its own work order so with monthly service we should be on top of our due dates.

  4. CODE REPORTS By performing proactive maintenance, we hope to avoid write-ups. When they do happen, we want to get those reports off the customer’s desk as quickly as possible. Do not let the little items like batteries stop you from getting the code report done promptly.

  5. RESPONSE TIMES

     1. Upon receipt of a service call, it is the mechanic’s responsibility to communicate with the customer within 15 minutes, providing an ETA.

     2. Notify the customer when we arrive on site.

     3. Provide an update to the customer upon completion. What did we find? What did we fix?

     4. If additional work or parts are required, we need to communicate updates on a regular basis.

  6. MAINTENANCE SERVICE VISITS Our company mindset and operating platform allows us to track consistently maintenance, service calls, testing dates and more. This includes checking in and out with our customers whenever it is required or asked of us. This is also important to make sure we are meeting customer expectations. Performing “old-school” preventative maintenance is very important to us. It’s one of the main factors that contributes to our high customer satisfaction record. Our “Full-Service” customers can expect 12 maintenance visits per year. Here’s what that looks like (not in this order):

     • 1 Visit – Category 1 (Annual) Testing

     • 1 Visit – Code Report Completion

     • 1 Visit – Deliver and prepare MCP.

     • 9 Visits – Maintenance / Housekeeping

At a minimum, on every visit we perform our “Top 10” tasks.

TECHNICAL TRAINING To wrap up the meeting, we spent about an hour discussing hydraulic control valves, specifically the I-2 valve. We watched videos by Linden Elevator and Ben reviewed Pascal’s Law. Then we moved to the shop where we disassembled an I-2 valve and discussed best practices. Most of this went right over my head! 😊 It was a reminder of how smart our team is.

That’s a lot of brain power!

Are you questioning your elevator service provider’s priorities? Call our Chief Problem Solver, Sean today!