Below is a shared experience from a past driver who now owns a successful agency in CA, Chip Martin from Daly Movers....
A million years ago, back when I was still doing local moves 7 days a week, I once moved a real estate developer who taught me a couple of lessons. This first thing I noticed when I walked into his house was a picture of him holding a globe over his head like he owned the world, causing me to prejudge the man an arrogant SOB. He was an arrogant SOB, I hastily concluded, but that wasn’t the point. That initial negative impression dictated my behavior for the rest of the move. As we walked through the house doing the pre-move he started pointing out all the stuff that needed to be packed whereupon I pointed out that we did not come prepared to pack. Sir, you ordered a local move, and we came prepared to give you a local move—not a pack job. He frowned while I stood my ground, and then we worked it out where I would go back to get some packing materials to accommodate him. Sometime later when we were moving the refrigerator out, he asked me to clean it before I delivered it to his new residence. I promptly told him I was mover, not a maid, and that movers move stuff, they don’t clean it. That went over about as good as our lack of packing materials, but I didn’t care, the guy was an arrogant idiot who expected me to be a mind reader about packing and a maid to clean his cheese stinking fridge.
As it turns, he wasn’t an arrogant ass with unreasonable expectations, he was simply overwhelmed and stressed out in the middle of an ugly divorce and just needed some help above and beyond. He told me my attitude stunk but he liked how I worked, and after that I became the official mover of his real estate company doing 3 or 4 moves a month for several years. Naturally, I had a self imposed attitude adjustment after that, and whatever he wanted, even if it was picking up his dog shit in the yard, I was Johnny on the spot with a smile on my face. I’m exaggerating here, but you get the point.
The most important lesson was that I move people, not furniture.
Yeah, we move the boxes, beds, and dressers, but these items are actually the physical extension of the shipper because the shipper has invested time, money, and memories in these possessions. Which is to stay, we can have the most perfect move from a claims and operational standpoint, but if the shipper isn’t happy in the end we have failed—period. The fact that the boxes, beds, and dressers were happy with the move doesn’t count.
The second thing, I learned is never to prejudge a customer. Once you do that, particularly in a negative manner, you have programmed yourself to treat the customer in certain way, and effectively stopped being empathetic and open minded. So what if the customer starts out with a lemon pucker smile. Cut her some slack instead of starting an attitude war. Who knows what’s going on in her life? Maybe somebody died, maybe she’s in the middle of a divorce like above, or maybe she just didn’t have her first cup of coffee. We were hired by her to do service, we’re there to do it, so we might as well do it with a smile on our face and give her one less thing to be stressed about. This brings up another important point—sometimes you never know who you’re moving. Like the story above about the real estate developer I moved. I had no idea who the customer was but I prejudged him which led me to be an uncooperative jerk, and though it turned out good in the end—I just got lucky. Another customer might have said ‘good riddance’ – for good reason— and I would have missed out on a boatload of business.
Finally, I can’t say enough about being flexible and prepared. After that move, I always kept a quantity of boxes in my truck just in case, that, and I told my inside sales staff (my wife at the time) to ask more thorough questions as in ‘will any packing be required?’ As for being flexible, when the customer told me he wanted packing I should have thanked him for putting more money in my pocket rather than pulling an attitude about doing more work. And the same can be said for cleaning the refrigerator, I mean, if the customer wanted to pay my hourly rate for a truck and 2 to clean it, why not? It’s his money and easier on my back. It’s not that we can provide a swap meet of services, we cannot be all things to all people, but we can keep a smile on our face, keep a positive attitude, and see the silver lining in things.
