“The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is not training your employees and keeping them.” – Zig Ziglar
Training is an ongoing venture.
Training the Painters
Painters, especially experienced painters, should have the skills to deal with anything related to their trade. Painting techniques, and effective ways to apply different coatings especially.
What about customer service? Is this something that painting companies take for granted, or do they plan and teach customer service to their painters?
It may take years for a painter to acquire all skills needed to perform his or her job in a professional manner. Modern coatings have to be able to withstand everything nature and people throw at them and still pass environmental standards. Painters every day have to learn to deal with the idiosyncrasies of every new product that comes along. At the same time painters need to meet tight budgets and difficult scheduling.
No wonder it takes years and thousands of hours to go through a painting apprenticeship.
Being Experienced Does not Guarantee Being Properly Trained
Customers tend to measure a painter’s skills by their experience in years, such as, five years, ten years, twenty years. However, experience does not guarantee the painter has been trained properly in the first place. Arguably, being trained to paint the right way, and ongoing training to upgrade skills is more important than painting experience. Like everyone else, painters are creatures of habit. Some of these habits are bad habits, shortcuts and “common sense” replacements of the correct procedures. For example, coatings used today are not the same as they were years ago. They have evolved dramatically. Manufacturers spend a lot of money on Research and Development, to keep up with consumer demand and government regulations. The old shortcuts painters used to use to make their job easier just don’t work any more. New and cutting edge products and recommendations of their application sometimes get rejected by the “ old timers.” “They don’t make paint the way they used to” is said often enough. In a way this is correct, they don’t. We just need to move forward and educate ourselves.
Training needs to become a regular business activity for successful painting companies.
A painter should paint well, so what?
The thinking that most customers have, is that a painter should know how to paint (whether they do or not is another story). They are right to expect that of course. What about customer service, though? Is this something that painting companies take for granted, or do they plan and teach customer service to their painters?
What will impress most customers though is not the actual paint job. Instead, studies show that customers will mostly remember the experience they had during the process of decorating.
Customer service is something that companies need to train to their employees. Developing customer service procedures and systems to implement them, is what distinguishes the better paint contractors from the rest.
For example, “Protecting Customer Property” is a trained skill.
Simple things are important.
- Arriving on time.
- Calling the customer if being late.
- Protecting customer property
- Being polite and thoughtful to the customer’s family and even neighbours.
- Communicating daily about the progress of the job and any issues.
- Cleaning up daily and plan the next day with the customer.
- Respecting the customer’s routine (not starting too early, not staying too late)
- Mindful about pets, plants and personal items.
Ecopainting painters are trained regularly. This could be a primary reason that keeps customers coming back and referring us to their friends.
To experience our service please call 416.733-7767