The quick and blunt answer is because sometimes I get so many incoming calls I could spend all day on the phone and doing no work.
The longer answer is, apart from the sheer volume of callers in the colder months, quite a few tend to be from people wanting advice only rather than to employ me, or to sell me something which could be anything from retirement investments to stationery. I’m happy to help people out with advice when I can but I have to earn a living and sometimes the calls wanting ‘advice only’ can be very time consuming and would take out too much of the day. Just so you know, giving advice by text takes up far less time so I’m usually still able to give text advice even when not telephone technical support. the phone is just too distracting from my main occupation of actually fixing boilers hence my use of the answerphone. Do feel reassured I hear every voicemail though, so if you don’t get a reply, send a text!
In addition, during busy periods there can be dozens of voice messages in a day even from people actually wanting me to visit and fix. When I sit down for a morning to ring back some voicemails, there can even be more voicemails after a couple of hours on the phone than than when I started as the voicemails can come in faster than I can return them! This is, however, not the case for most of the year. At quieter times of year the call rate might fall back to one or two a day, far easier to cope with.
I know this must be frustrating especially if you are a regular customer, or even if you aren’t, and especially if you have left a voicemail or two and had no response, so a bit of advice. Firstly, I prioritise people who have left more than one message or who are previous customers of mine, so tell me if you are an old customer. Secondly, callers who don’t tell me their geographical location and boiler model (my outgoing message asks specifically for this information) by necessity are at the back of the queue. Thirdly, sending a text message to my mobile often short-cuts all this and gets a quicker response than leaving me a voicemail message. I can type out replies to four or five texts in the time a single phone conversation soaks up. Further, I can answer texts later at night than would seem appropriate to make a phone call, or earlier in the morning, so texting is always a good idea. Fourthly, sometimes my diary is just plain full and I just have to ignore ALL the channels of communication and get out there and mend the boilers I’ve scheduled to mend. It may seem surprising but I spend a lot more time returning calls and texts than I ever spend on site actually mending boilers.
Email works pretty much like text but slower, as I won’t see your email until I go to my inbox and have a look. Maybe today, or maybe tomorrow.
Now a word about WhatsApp. WhatsApp is good for sending images and photos to me as images are free, unlike via text. Quite a few phone tariffs charge handsomely for sending pictures and videos by text message so beware. I sometimes get incoming WhatsApp calls too, which I don’t answer when busy for all the reasons listed above. Calling me via WhatsApp has a disadvantage though – there is no voicemail facility so you won’t get the chance to leave me a voice message. To do that you’ll need to make a conventional phone call. WhatsApp text messages arrive though, just like a text.
So there we are, I hope that gives you an insight into how I handle enquiries and why it might sometimes seem haphazard. With all these communication channels it is very easy to miss people inadvertently so feel free to contact me again if you didn’t get a reply. Sometimes I need nagging.
All the best,
Mike