I was going through a recorded service meeting with the Kalos techs, and Bert shared something that has been rattling around in my head ever since. His team went digging through their callback data looking for patterns, and after stepping back and looking at it, one showed up that nobody expected:

The newer techs were getting fewer callbacks.

Not zero. They still got misdiagnosis callbacks, the ones that come from not knowing enough yet. But the annoying, preventable ones? The drain that backs up a week after a capacitor swap. The disconnect left swinging open in the wind. The caps left off. Those weren't coming from the newest techs. They were coming from the rest of us.

That should get your attention. The tech who knows the least is somehow winning at the thing that matters most.

Scared Is a Skill

Here is Bert's explanation, and I think he nailed it: The new tech is scared. He is terrified of doing something wrong, so he double-checks himself constantly. He hooks up gauges even when he probably doesn't need to. He's the guy who dumps water down the drain just in case. He calls for support. He checks boxes nobody asked him to check, and every stop takes him longer than it should.

In other words, he gives the call more attention than it strictly requires. And it turns out that when a call gets that much attention, the little things get caught. The loose panel gets noticed. The sluggish drain gets flushed. The problem that would have become next Tuesday's callback gets handled today, by accident, because a nervous rookie was busy being thorough.

Then experience shows up, and it brings speed with it. We know what the problem is faster, we fix it faster, and all those “unnecessary” extras quietly fall away. Nobody decides to skip them. They just stop happening. The diagnosis gets sharper while the attention gets thinner, and that's the gap callbacks sneak through.

You Can't Stay Scared, So Build It In

Nobody wants to work terrified for thirty years, and you shouldn't. The rookie's fear is not the goal; the rookie's behavior is. The fix is to take the things fear made you do and bolt them into your process on purpose, so they happen even when you're confident and in a hurry.

Bert's team picked two:

Clean or quote the drain, every time. 

Drains are the team's number one callback, and probably yours, too. Bert's routine as a tech was three minutes: suck out the trap with a vacuum, dump a gallon of water down it. He did it whether the drain was the reason for the call or not. If it's a situation where cleaning it for free makes sense, like a maintenance contract or a fresh install, do it. Everywhere else, quote it, and if the customer declines, put it in your notes. Now a drain callback isn't your fault. It's a documented conversation and a second chance to sell the work.

Touch everything before you leave

Not a “final checklist” you breeze through in the front seat of your van. After a difficult service call, things can be missed, so finish the call completely. Invoice. Collect payment. Then, you can say goodbye. Bert recommends including one very important thing in your goodbye:

“My last step before I leave is a walkthrough to make sure I didn't leave any tools and everything's back together.”

Once you've said that out loud, it's awkward not to do it. Then walk back and put your hands on the equipment. Thermostat, air handler, condenser. Coming back after you think you're done matters, because you're looking with different eyes. That's when you spot the screws in your pocket and the panel that isn't latched.

Two habits. Maybe six extra minutes on a call. That's the whole tax.

If you're new, don't let anyone rush the fear out of you before you've turned it into a process. You're already doing this right, even if it doesn't feel like it. And if you've been doing this a while, it's worth an honest look at which of those extras have quietly fallen out of your routine. It happens to the best techs out there. That's exactly why it's worth checking.

For more on this, Bryan has covered the definition of a callback and how to prevent them in Avoiding and Eliminating Callbacks, and there's a good companion piece in Famous Last Words (Before a Callback).

—JD Kelly