Tradesmen Learning People Skills To Handle Unexpected

CINCINNATI (Thursday, June 16, 2005) - With companies that send their employees into customers' homes - everything from maid services to professional handymen - the odds are, at some point, something unusual or downright strange is going to happen.

Increasingly, these businesses have been training their franchise owners and employees how to expect the unexpected, and more importantly, how to handle it.

At House Doctors, a Milford-based national franchise of professional handymen, the week-long training for franchise owners includes several hours devoted to sensitivity training directed at handling uncomfortable situations with a customer, everything from barely-clothed housewives to heated domestic disputes.

Some of that training involves simply making sure employees do everything they can to avoid being placed in an awkward set of circumstances.

Steve Cohen, CEO of House Doctors, realized the need for this type of training 10 years ago, when he operated the first House Doctors. He arrived at a home that looked like an overturned dumpster, with day-old pizza boxes scattered in the living room, open soda cans lying about and roaches and ants scattering about.

"I could not in my right mind ask a handyman to work here," recalls Cohen, who had to do some elaborate verbal gymnastics to decline the job without offending the customer.

House Doctors franchise owner, Dan Landon, who covers eastern Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, says that despite his staff having gone through thorough background checks, he tries not to have them - or himself - working at a home when only a teenage daughter is present, for obvious reasons.

But there are other times when there's nothing you can do. Landon says that one of his employees was contracted to fix rotting wood around a window by a married couple, and he was outside the house in the middle of the afternoon making the repairs, when the wife came out of the bathroom, au naturel, possibly oblivious - but apparently unconcerned - with the presence of the handyman. The employee averted his eyes, kept doing his repairs and said nothing to the couple about the incident.

"He was on the second floor," says Landon. "He told me he was just glad he was hanging tightly onto the ladder at the time."

Paul Kowal, president of Kowal & Associates and a customer service expert in Boston, says that Landon's employee likely did the right thing. "In a situation where you observe something potentially embarrassing, not saying anything is probably smarter than bringing it up."

That these awkward situations come up, says Kowal, "speaks for the busier and busier lifestyle that we have, where we have to have people working in our house whenever we can get them, meaning that you're more and more likely to be in a compromising position."

Jim Leamer II, general manager of retail sales at McSwain Carpets, concurs. "People barely have time to sit down and eat dinner for thirty minutes let alone have carpet being laid in a house all day. There's chaos, furniture everywhere. It's a very invasive, disruptive, agonizing process, and people don't always realize that. We do understand that, and we try to make it as smooth a process as we can."

Several months ago, Leamer asked his carpet installers - and "had virtually 100 percent attendance" - to attend a national two-day seminar on customer service that dealt with sensitivity training and customer relationships. It's training that should come in handy, especially the next time they have a day like they had a year or two ago.

Leamer recalls that a customer was doing yard work, digging, at the time his carpet was being laid, and the client struck some pipes. Somehow, this customer, in a maneuver that would have made Tim Allen's character on "Home Improvement" proud, the pipes burst inside the house, soaking the newly installed carpet.

"The insurance company was able to cover the costs," says Leamer, "but that day, our employees were able to help with the bigger mess," including presumably giving the man an empathetic shoulder to cry on. "They were able to step in and kind of save the day. We were able to get his house back in order - in a day - or two."

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