“CompanyCam allows us to educate customers about what we do so they can decide if we provide more value and are worth the extra money. It allows us to take and share job photos. We can share information between teams and with customers. We can document and use those images to prove what we did to solve customer problems.”
Saving Their Bacon
In one case, CompanyCam even saved Home Heating from problems when a consumer was looking for someone to blame for their problems. Secor tells the story of this particular consumer who called them requesting maintenance work on their attic system.
Later, that consumer had a fire and blamed Home Heating because they said it was caused by some heat tape that Secor’s service expert used on their drain line.
“I opened up the customer’s CompanyCam file on my cell phone, saw which tech was on that call, and also saw he took a picture when he was leaving,” he explains.
“We hadn’t been there since. So, I asked the customer on the line if I could send them a picture showing no heat tape on the drain line.
“There was a long pause, and then the customer said it must have been another company and hung up. That one instance of using CompanyCam proved its worth and saved our bacon.”
Home Heating’s Journey Must Include Training
When it comes to the tools and instruments his team uses to perform their work professionally, Ric Secor says success requires training.
“I think training is important. It really helped me. At one company where I worked for more than 20 years, the owner provided me with training opportunities that changed my life. He did this during a time when most HVAC companies in the late 1980s and 1990s didn’t focus on training.”
Secor explains that as a result of his experiences, his philosophy is to provide as much training as his team wants.
“We aren’t a huge shop but have a training room with operational equipment,” he explains.
Secor regularly uses outside training firms as well. He recently sent one of his newest team members to the Ultimate Technical Academy in Arkansas to earn an EPA certification.
Other educational outlets include reading HVAC trade magazines. He says he discovered National Comfort Institute (NCI) in some of those magazines. Then, he met NCI trainer David Holt in 2018 at a program in Washington.
“That is where I really came to understand how NCI membership could benefit my company.”
Subsequently Secor recently joined NCI to help advance his team’s technical prowess. He says he is excited to get his guys going with combustion and carbon monoxide (CO) safety training and refocusing on airside testing and measurement.
“We are at the highest NCI membership level. We’re saving up our NCI bucks to use for training. I hope to have one or two of our service experts attend the CO training this fall. After that, I plan to send some of our guys to airflow training scheduled in the Pacific Northwest and Denver over the next couple of months.”
Bringing High-Performance HVAC into the Home Heating Fold
After attending his first NCI High-Performance HVAC Summit in Branson, MO, in 2023, Ric says he was utterly amazed at the systematic and method-based approach to total system performance. As stated earlier, he bought six TrueFlow Grids and already has his service experts using them in the field.
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