Why do we offer 4-hour arrival timeframes? And why that’s not as inconvenient as you may think
The appointments that we offer are four-hour timeframe appointments between 8 am-12 noon, 12 noon – 4 pm, and 4-8 pm. We appreciate that this may seem inconvenient to people so we wanted to clarify what this means, explain why we do it, and show you that this is really not as inconvenient as it may seem.
Why our appointments are four-hour timeframes and not time
As a company, a large proportion of our work is responding to emergency plumbing and heating jobs and repairs. This means that priorities are constantly shifting all day as different jobs come in. Factors such as how urgent or potentially dangerous the issue is, whether there are vulnerable people in the property and the location in relation to the position of our engineers all have to be taken into consideration when scheduling the day. A job that may have started as 2nd or 3rd in the schedule may have to be moved to later as other jobs come in. Likewise, they may become more urgent as situations develop and need to be moved up.
Another influencing factor is the nature of the work we do. If we were simply out conducting services all day, where we have a good idea of how long each job will take because they’re all pretty much the same, it would be easier to stick to a fixed timetable. However, the nature of emergency jobs is that we simply don’t know what we might find when we get there; it could be a simple fix or a much more complex repair. We are therefore not in a position to estimate how long each job will take so while we may know the order of jobs during the day (which of course could change anyway) we wouldn’t know how quickly we can progress through those jobs. Compounded by the ‘columbo’ approach many of our customers have, of ‘while you are here there is one more thing…’ we just never know how long we will be with the customer before you.
You can see then that it’s impossible for us to give customers an accurate time frame for their engineer visit. We have to manage people’s expectations and we think it’s better to be completely transparent and say that it is a window rather than give an estimated time and not be able to deliver on that promise.
We understand that people would prefer to have timed appointments but hopefully, this does clarify why we’re not able to provide them and why we work the way we do. We are committed to providing a high level of service to our customers: our standard operating hours for both engineers and office are 8 am – 6 pm Monday to Friday and we also offer a 24-hour emergency call-out service.
A plumbing emergency can be a distressing experience but we truly are here to get to you as soon as we can and resolve your issue as efficiently as we can. If you have any further queries about appointments or any other aspect of our services please call us on 01234325620 or send us a message at info@christyplumbing.co.uk .
