Below: a nuts and bolts reflection on customer service within the painting industry.  A bit dry, but not as dry as paint once it's...dried.   

It’s Sunday evening, the local paper’s spread across the coffee table, and you’ve just finished reading the Business section’s lede: “Making Mondays Count,” five tips for the industrious worker bee bent on starting the week with a bang. 

Feeling like you want to move your business to head of the colony while leaving a few of your competitor drones behind, you log onto your server remotely to check voicemails.  After a few minutes, you’re wishing you’d spent your Sunday watching football instead—at least those guys get their Mondays off!

• “Hello, this is Mrs. Johnson at 45 Rutherford…I’m fairly sure we’d agreed that you’d paint the kitchen cabinets, but I noticed the men have already moved their shop to the upstairs area.  I didn’t have a chance to speak with Joe before he and his crew left for the day Friday, but I’m concerned they missed out on that area.  Would you call me when you get in Monday so we can discuss?”
• “Frank Williams over at 36 Winthrop.  I know we had some rainy weather at the beginning of the week, but I just got back from my week at the Cape and it doesn’t look like you guys made very much progress at all while I was away.  Can you call and update me on the work, please?”
• “This is Susan Randall…were your men even here on Friday?  Everything looks exactly the same as I left it on Thursday!”

Customer communication is primary to the success of any business; within the painting industry, whose language often comes drop-clothed in jargon, customer communication may very well be the difference between a successful project and a failure, between understanding and confusion.  To that end, the forward-thinking painting contractor might seek to supplement its foreman’s daily debriefings with a more systematic means of communicating project progress to its customers. 

Indeed, the comprehensibility, attention to detail, and clarity of communication that a high-end home improvement customer should and will demand might perhaps best be met in writing; by the same token, a high-end home improvement contractor should and will hold itself to a similar standard of accuracy and transparency.  Both aims might easily be bridged through the contractor’s compilation and dissemination of a Project Book: put simply, a weekly record of progress on a project, kept by the painting contractor’s operations department in consultation with that project’s foreman and given to its customer at the close of each workweek.

Consider our aforementioned Mrs. Rutherford and her unpainted kitchen cabinets.  An ideal Project Book would have nipped her concerns in the bud via its preceding week’s summary entry:

‘Project Progress Week of September 14: We have finished all prep work in the kitchen and expect to begin paint work early next week, with the exclusion of the cabinets to the right of the sink—as those cabinets will require a Schreuder gloss hand-applied, we will opt to bring our finest finish painter onto the project at his earliest convenience the week of September 28th to complete that work while the remaining crew is wrapping up the second floor.’

In addition to a relatively jargon-free summary of each week’s work on a project, the successful Project Book might contain most or all of the following:

• Weekly breakdown of time spent on project: this information could come directly from crew timesheets, e.g., “5 hours sanding kitchen walls, 2 hours priming, 1 hour first coat paint, .75 hrs second coat paint”
• An account of any disruptions, crew changes, unexpected situations and your team’s response, e.g., “September 13, heavy rain in area until late afternoon so crew unable to proceed on exterior portion of job,” or “July 10, foreman discovered minor water damage above bathroom vanity, informed customer and obtained signed change order for the extra work: foreman to complete patching and repair by week’s end”
• Copies of the original estimate, signed contract, all signed change orders, and all pre-project customer communication (e-mails regarding scheduling, any special considerations, time away from home, location of housekeys, pet’s names, etc.)
• Interior floor plans and photos, exterior photos (w/instructions if applicable)
• Names and contact information of all office staff, crew members, and customer(s)

Assembled properly and with care, your Project Book will act as a living document, able to give customer and crew alike a detailed snapshot of history, progress, and forward momentum on to completion.  Just ask our Susan Randall--if only she’d had access to her own Project Book, she might have thumbed through the customer contact section to see: “Customer requests we remain offsite while she is out of town Friday”!