Gendreau's Restaurant Equipment Repair

..started with the idea that service means more than showing up several days after a customer calls with a problem.

I designed the concept around 2 things.

1. My many years spent as Maintenance Director for a major healthcare company.

and..

2. My 7 years of service as a senior technician for a major commercial appliance service company here in the Tampa Bay area.

I wanted to provide the reliability, easy access, ease of communication, and confidence, of having a maintenance staff on hand for my customers, while at the same time, I wanted to avoid the usual pitfalls of the major service companies. The service companies tend to loose their focus on customer service due to the layered structure of their operations.

Too many layers.

Typically, the process within this larger company worked as follows:

A customer would call for service and would reach an answering machine that would eventually connect them to a person with very little or no technical experience. Generally this person didn't understand the importance of the equipment being discussed, and a customer would rarely talk to the same person twice in a row. Causing them to feel many times that they had fallen in the cracks, and frankly, many times they had.

Once taken, the service call might sit for several days before actually being dispatched to a technician in the area of the call. This is based on the "Zone" dispatch method.

A technician is assigned a zone. Usually, this is the area he lives in. He leaves his home each morning, and may be at his first call within 15 minutes. However, the customer is charged a "trip" charge, or "truck" charge based on the distance from the office.

These "trip" charges are passed along to the customer as if the tech was making a trip from the office, and never based on actual drive time.

Many times, the amount of time before being dispatched depended less on how busy or where the tech was, and more on how well the person doing the dispatching liked the customer, or whether or not they had made promises to "preferred" customers, which could add a day or 2 to the wait time.

It is more profitable to keep a tech in his zone. So in most cases, he is allowed only 1-2 trips per week to the office to gather his parts he has ordered for units that are down. This means that if he has already made his trip to the shop this week, you won't see him again with your part until the following week at a minimum, and longer wait times can occur due to creative parts ordering.

It's more profitable to order parts at a greater volume. So the major company may hold back ordering parts until they have enough orders for a particular manufacturer to make it more profitable for them. Meanwhile, you wait.

In the event that the customer had noted special instructions, such as:

CUSTOMER: "it's the thermostat, make sure the tech brings one with him"

...they were rarely passed on to the technician, and even if they were the tech is usually not allowed to leave his zone to retrieve the part, resulting in a technician informing the customer after an hour of diagnostics, "I'll have to order you a t-stat" causing more aggravation, and more down time as the very part the customer had said to bring along, was ordered in.

This is lunacy...

No way to run a service company...

No way to please a customer...

Does any of this sound at all familiar..?

Gendreau's Is Different...

Your call goes directly to the technician's cell phone...

You discuss the problem with the technician, NOT a secretary...

The technician will inform you of his schedule as it stands, and will give you various options for service based on that schedule...

Usually, if the call comes in before 11 a.m., the tech is able to schedule it in today...

If not, tomorrow's schedule is discussed, so you will have a clear picture of when to expect your service call.

In the event you can not wait, after hours scheduling is available at emergency rates...

If the tech does not have a needed part on hand, he will attempt to find it locally, or order it in at any method YOU choose.

Our location in Brandon gives us easy access to the surrounding communities.

Our rates are simple:

$65 for the first half hour

$65 per hour after that

The first 30 minutes of actual drive time is on us, after that regular rates apply. This means any location within a 1 hour round trip would cost $32.50 in travel. Compare that to any other service company in the area and you'll find our rates are very reasonable.

Time and 1/2 after 5 pm Weekdays and on Weekends

Double Time on Holidays

Call 813-545-2893 to experience service the way it was meant to be.