IN-HOUSE SERVICE VS CONTRACTOR

[stuart]

This was from another topic but I thought it needed it's own chat space....

We do both

We use a contractor for off brands that we don’t carry but only for overflow. For our brands we use factory certified technicians and I believe that there are some important things for you to understand between the two.

1.      I carry 4 million dollars in liability insurance, contractors are not covered under this only company employees.
2.      Most private service companies consist of one guy who may have an assistant. Most are not factory trained and up to date on any changes or adjustments to your spa. although most understand troubleshooting, plumbing, electrical and mechanical switches it would be hard for them to keep up with the weekly service bulletins sent out to most dealers for every brand.
3.      all of my technicians are on a pay scale that allows bonus’s, raises and reprimands based on their customer service toward the customer. With a contractor I can choose to either use him or not and quite often they just need to be “good enough”. There really is no incentive for them to be better, they get paid the same no matter what.
4.      Most contractors are not loyal to one company and therefore have no direct need to go overboard to keep that customer for the dealer. Good enough is typically “Good enough”.
5.      We have on-going training for our technicians that reflects the service bulletins, changes and retrofits (that I mention earlier) every week if not daily.
6.      My employees drive my service vehicles equipped with our brand specific parts to complete the call in one visit while many contractors need to troubleshoot the problem and then get parts. I have not the time, energy nor resources to equip an outside contractor’s vehicle with our brand specific parts, inventory and restock those parts in addition to the cash outlay when he is working for my direct competitor at the same time.
7.      We even require our technicians to wear uniform shirts for the confidence of the people that have them coming to their houses to know who they are and where they are from at all times.

I will give you an example of one incident that was handled wrong by a contractor that became a negative that should have been a positive. Marquis has a maintenance reminder on their spas that comes up as a CL code to remind the customer once a month to clean their filters -  once you hit any button on the panel it clears. Last year Marquis received some Circuit boards from Balboa that the chips on the board where not programmed correctly and the CL code could not be cleared. Before we ever had our first spa with an incident Marquis sent me a description of the problem, new chips for the board, a tool to remove/replace the old ones and serial #’s of all of the spas we purchased with potential problems. We thought this was a quick easy fix and we had a technician out sick so we sent out a contractor to take care of a few of these. Shortly after he did I had two customers call and say that “our technician” told them that Marquis was having a lot of problems with this and many spas were failing! He also said that he worked on many brands and this was the first time he had ever come across this. You want to build doubt in a new customer tell them spas like theirs are failing all over!

The reality was that this was a proactive factory recall that should have made the customer feel that Marquis was an incredible company to have a fix in place before they ever had a problem and go to the extent of not “waiting to see if it happened”. This tech also made a similar comment to a competitive salesman at another dealership who changed it to “Yes sir Mr. Customer, we have a technician that works on our stuff and theirs all of the time tell me that Marquis electronics are failing”. What a lie! The truth was that tech didwork on their spas all of the time, they could not keep up with all of the issues their spas were having yet this tech rarely ever worked on Marquis!

Trying to instill our company ethics, our vision and our core values in an independent contractor is like trying to get the neighbor kid to live under your family rules! I know that there are honest, dependable, diplomatic and forthright companies doing independent service but I like the ability to supervise and work with my tech’s on a daily basis so that I have my pulse on their attitude and outlook on customer service issues, then I can instill our values.  


I also believe one loophole that is not covered here is that most Manufactures warranty’s state that service must be preformed by a factory authorized technician or service center. In a dealer agreement, in order to be a factory authorized service center you need to have a factory trained tech on site...

[Brewman]

I would think that most companies would require a factory authorized repair person to get warranty reimbursement.  And not only for spas, but other products as well.  

Maybe it's not true all the time, but every warranty I've ever read says to return the merchandise to an authorized service center to get warranty work done.
Or to have a factory rep. do on-site work for items too large to move, like major appliances and such.

Do you, or any other spa pro know if an unauthorized repair person did work on my spa, would they be able to apply to Sundance (in my case) and get reimbursed?

What about installing non factory parts?

Brewman

[wmccall]

Stuart,

Thanks for the view from the other side of the fence.  I've been a factory authorized rep and an independent contractor both.  (Bad mouthing Dell the  whole time )

[stuart]

Stuart,

Thanks for the view from the other side of the fence.  I've been a factory authorized rep and an independent contractor both.  (Bad mouthing Dell the  whole time )

I have to...

In fact I've even been both in office equipment repair.

[wetone]

stuart,

Very well put... that's a lot of typing;)

We are one sided, I guess... We do everything in-house with factory certified technicians.

I want to have 100% control over the service of the  spas we sold. We have a service goal, if a spa breaks down that we sold, we aim to have it back up and running with-in 3 hours of recieving the call.  We have a 98% success rate which would not be possible with an independant service contractor.

I would consider using outside service company for spas we did not sell, how-ever we do not have that option in our area. No compitent service companies around here.


Now... a question about Dell... they no good?

[wetone]

Do you, or any other spa pro know if an unauthorized repair person did work on my spa, would they be able to apply to Sundance (in my case) and get reimbursed?

Brewman

The way I understand this is, if... an unauthorized repair person services my spa, D1 would not pay them for it. It is the selling dealers responcibility, and if the selling dealer is not around any more then D1 would have the spa serviced buy some one they made arrangements with.

[Spatech_tuo]

I would consider using outside service company for spas we did not sell, how-ever we do not have that option in our area. No compitent service companies around here.

I still think Haven Spas has the best service approach. Sell the spa with a warranty but then have the customer fix it themselves when the issues arise. Wow, what a concept.

[Brewman]

But if you play nice, Jim or Sandy will stop by with home made cookies next time thru.  As well as ask you to host wet tests to total strangers.
Brewman