OnDemand

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Primary Service Policies - Expanded Details:

5. Operator's Day-Before Call

Bobcat Service Division

with-operator rentals, excavation services

Point 5 of our 5 primary service policies is actually a group of 4 policy points itself, which in turn have a few sub-points each.  These are mainly last-minute matters and they can be discussed with your operator when he calls you the day before your scheduled service.  There 4 main issues that he will likely talk about when he calls you:

1. Arrival time - When to expect him to be there the next day.

2. Rain - What happens if it is raining the next morning?

3. Various site issues - Like parking, who we are to be meeting on site, will you rememer your locate paperwork, etc.

4. Float fees - Were you concerned what your float fee was going to be?  Now that your operator has been assigned and the branch established, it is possible to give you a firm price on your float fee (if it matters to you - they don't vary by very much, a $20-40 swing at most in almost all cases)

(Please click on each for more details)

These topics are gathered under this last category for a reason as opposed to being dealt with separately – they have in common the fact that they can only be practically dealt with at the last minute between you and your assigned branch/machine operator. 

And the reason for that is, that although they might seem to be matters that could be covered at the time of your booking with the dispatcher, the fact is that the nature of each and the type of business we have makes it a lot more practical for them to be handled between you (our customer) and your assigned operator directly.  And obviously that conversation can only happen once it has been established who in fact your operator will be.  And that normally happens only when we close to the day of your booking, usually by about the day before.  Rarely can we (dispatch) say with 100% certainty 3 or 4 days beforehand who your operator will be precisely (by name) or even the branch that will be assigned it for certain.* (see below for reasons why that is)

So, our operators are encouraged to follow a policy of attempting to make this call the day before to his customer(s) for the next day – a policy we call our Day-Before Call.  At which point, many of the following issues are briefly discussed with you.

Disclaimer: although this is our policy to have the operator make this call the day before, the fact is that we do guarantee that we/he will always do so – sometimes the operators end up working on a jobsite until very late the night before or on a high-pressure site and have no opportunity to make the call to you, or they just forget; it happens.  But remember that you can always be the one to initiate the call yourself, by phoning in to dispatch yourself the day before as well.

*By the way, the reason for that seemingly late-date for making the final decision on who your operator will be, is due to the “On-Demand” nature of our service and the fact that there are so many variables out of our control – frequently customers make last-minute change request of us before we even get to their site (so often they will reschedule/postpone, make changes in equipment, etc), and once we are there on site things can occur that also impact our schedule and have ripple effects for days, and on other operators and branches  (assignments that take longer than planned, the customer adding more work once we get there – it’s pretty hard to pack up and leave when that happens, weather issues, and so on), and especially when we have a constantly tightly-packed schedule to begin with! 

So we do our best, but that’s how it is in this business.  Good thing we have a lot of operators and hence flexibility built into our system to absorb those over-runs and potential schedule conflicts – something you will come to appreciate is that we remarkably infrequently have to come to you and ask that we reschedule or delay – it’s a pretty rare occurrence. You can count on us to be there on the day and approximate time you wanted, probably 95% of the time, or 19 out of your 20 last bookings with us, or better, conservatively.  It is a record we are proud of and hang our hat on.

A small one or two man/machine operation just can’t compete with that kind of reliability.  We frequently get calls from customers desperate to get us in and take care of them because there previously booked guy is letting them down, said he’d be there 2 days ago and now it looks like he’ll be another few days or a week or more and they just can’t wait.  They use us once, and never go back.  Our prices are comparable or better than most, so they aren’t paying a premium to have this awesome service and peace of mind, reliability.  We capture a lot of new business this way.)