PSA: Talking to a fire alarm tech made me rethink our phone support

Had a smoke alarm go off at a job site in Portland last Tuesday and this older fire alarm guy happened to be there too. He told me his company stopped taking calls from homeowners after 6 PM because they kept getting nuisance calls that wasted everyone's time. Said they lost two good installers in a year because they were getting dragged out to reset systems at midnight for no reason. Hit me hard because I've been running my own crew and we answer texts at all hours. Thinking about setting a hard cutoff time for residential support calls. Anyone else set boundaries like that or am I overthinking it?

3 comments

3 Comments

rowan_thomas841mo ago

Yeah but that's a different kind of work. Resetting a fire alarm at midnight is one thing, telling a homeowner their furnace can wait til morning is another bag of worms entirely. You might lose more customers than you save by cutting off support that hard.

phoenixw111mo ago

And that's honestly the root of it, isn't it? We've all gotten so used to everything being available 24/7 that we forget some people just need to sleep. Ngl, I see this same pattern at the grocery store too - people getting upset when the deli counter closes at 8pm even though it's posted on the door. It's like we expect every single service to bend over backwards for us no matter the hour. But running a business means drawing some lines, even if a few customers get salty about it.

kelly.hannah1mo ago

I mean, I feel like people blow this out of proportion a bit. Yeah, it's annoying when a deli counter's closed but is it really that deep? Like, you'll survive without sliced turkey for one night.