Customers have a license to misbehave. I tell my service rep clients that a customer's job is to do what's best for themselves. Customers care little about whether their behavior upsets a service rep. After all, service professionals are supposed to help the customers and not the other way around. A customer's bad attitude and subsequent bad behavior shouts the assertion “It's all about me!”

Let's examine a specific customer behavior among trade industries that manifests the “It's all about me!” attitude ― the routine is Price Shopping.

“How much do you charge to fix a broken faucet?” asks a customer in a terse and perfunctory manner. If the plumber's phone rep begins to qualify symptomatic details or asks when the faucet started leaking, the customer may abruptly attempt to steer the phone rep back on the, “Just tell me how much you charge,” track with even more curt mannerisms. At this point, the preverbal door is still open for a business relationship.

Quoting prices over the phone is a precarious practice because of the absence of vital details and visual confirmation. The customer ends any hope of a business relationship and slams the preverbal door shut. Any hope of re-opening the door is remote due to the customer’s focus on price.

On the receiving end, the strategy I recommend to home service companies for handling price-shopping customers is to shift the conversation from price to value.

When a home service phone rep focuses on value rather then price in a well-paced, articulate and friendly manner, a new dialogue begins. This new dialogue challenges a customer's mindset about whether a customer should entrust their home and their family's safekeeping to the cheapest guy in town.

The icing on the cake occurs when a skilled phone rep invites a customer to call back after searching for the cheapest guy in town. This invitation is known as KEEPING THE DOOR OPEN and it is very effective. Success with keeping the door open strategy lies in the reality that a customer's search for the cheapest guy in town will often fail. This predicament puts the customer in a difficult and sometimes embarrassing situation, because the leak still needs to be fixed.

So who will the customer call now? The customer will call the home service company who extended the nicest invitation along with a persuasive value-based explanation.

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