Why is communication so bad in this country?

the prolem is your hiring a self employed person or a small team and not a big company. the small team cannot have someone sitting around doing the admin side of things and if they did it would have to reflect that in the bill.

i would love be able to keep on top of all the admin stuff but i would need either someone else to do it or take a day or 2 off a week to do it. the daily costs would then reflect that. customers want all the benifits of that set up but at normal costs

When it comes to people in the trade they are generally useless at that kind of stuff. It's not because they don't have have the 'team' to do the admin stuff. It's because they don't give a ****. They have no shortage of customers lining up to give them business so they have no real incentive to give a **** about responding to you in particular.

They are bad at it, so they avoid doing it.

They get away with it, because of there's so much demand.

Best organised guys are those who had someone's running the admin side for them.

It's ridiculous. Send a quick message to say you can't do the job. Free, simple, always available communication tool and it's not even used.

Booked a plumber to come and look at the heating with two weeks notice. Never turned up. Didn't even send a text message saying he couldn't turn up. Didn't even respond to messages.

That's just one example.

i understand that but it never works like that. one text leads to loads. if i started texting everyone that texts me i would be on the phone all day.

i agree it would be nice for the customer. i am in the same situation dealing with guys aswell but you have to understand what our day is like. you could easily use an hour a day on the phone that the customer wont be happy to pay for . between yesterday and today i made 46 calls and 32 texts to customers, suppliers etc.

Use AI to schedule the work for you. Everyones happy.

AI can handle Mary's schedule change, thats ok.

I'd say its worth looking in to.

If you aren't doing it, you can be sure the next guy will.

And the OP will be paying the next guy in future because the next guy responds instantly to booking requests and still somehow manages to dedicate all his time to completing the job.

The bottom line here is that there are not enough people in most trades/services to service the demand out there.

One of the issues is scheduling, but probably the biggest is the difficulty in finding the appropriate person for your job. If you have a small job, a leaking radiator for example, if you try heating installers, they're probably not interested, it's a nuisance and a distraction. If you find a local guy who does these kind of small jobs he's probably ideal.

I worked with an electrical company for five years, we had between 5 and 20 guys on between 5 and 10 sites at any one time. There was absolutely no capacity in the company to go and do a small domestic call out, that's a simple fact. That there were undoubtedly electricians out there that were miles more suitable is also true. Finding out who they are is generally the issue.

Thats fair enough. But why can't tradesmen just say I'm not interested in doing your job or sorry I'm too busy. Vary often they say they can do the job but then don't turn up or go uncontactable.

Saying no at the first point of contact would surely save alot of hassle for both sides

Just treat these guys the same way when it comes to paying. Ignore calls and texts, say you should be able to get around to it next week. Maybe pay them a few months later.

thats a very fast way to get your self black listed with all the local trades,.

they couldn’t care less it’s as simple as that, too much work, drag people on for ages and ages knowing that they won’t go to anyone else because they’ll be at the end of another queue then, my best friend is a Chippy, he loves to have a laugh saying “I have 3 people promised for tomorrow so there will be a few people not happy with me” etc. He goes mad if not paid right away, he doesn’t like it when I tell him that he’s just getting a taste of his own medicine back. It’s just arrogance and a taking the piss in my opinion.

That's really not how it works. having admin staff doesn't mean customers pay extra per job. It means the business take on more job (charging the same per job)

In some ways this is fair enough, if he's also giving you details of his day rate or hourly rate. He's being very clear up front as to how he works, and you can take it or leave it.

I'd have some sympathy for him in being expected to put in a couple of hours driving, then assess and quote, then answer questions, and get nothing back for it.