Service company

This article delves into the issues related to service companies. You will discover basic information necessary for a more informed selection of a service company. When choosing a service company for your elevator, you may easily fall into various situations. The following are common scenarios:

• You received an overpriced offer for repairs.
• The service company claims that the only way to repair your equipment is to replace the entire electrical installation.
• The company fails to fulfill contractual obligations (late arrivals for repairs, etc.).

How to Deal with It?

Regardless of how you arrived at your choice, it’s important to focus attention on the following aspects:

• References
• Years of experience in the market
• Local or global presence
• Price

Price

When you look at the mentioned aspects, the price is highlighted in red. Why? Not because our services are excessively priced. It’s due to the absence of the possibility to truly determine if a service company is expensive or not. Of course, we consider the possibility that you are not familiar with the elevator industry and, therefore, do not have an overview of the actual service prices from different companies. You want to find out for yourself. To truly find out if a company is expensive, you request a service contract proposal for your elevator.

In the contract proposal, you will find valuable information such as hourly rates, response time for repairs, the cost of flat-rate service, and, most importantly, the scope of services for which you pay a flat fee. You might think that based on this information, you can estimate the price of a specific company. Not so!

In practice, when replacing the pulley of shaft doors, it realistically takes 15 minutes. In the work report, you will see 2 hours of work and sometimes even with two people. Furthermore, you don’t know in advance how much the company will charge you for the replacement pulley.

Do you think monitoring the workers of the service company or a preliminary list of prices for spare parts is the solution? It’s not. The service company’s reaction could be that the frequency of the need to replace pulleys increases.

The most credible way to find out that a service company is not “overcharging” you is a long-term overview of all elevator costs over the years. To avoid the risk of a bad test/method, we would recommend relying on the references of the company or the real experiences of someone else.

The price for the flat-rate service in the contract is not very important information unless the price differs at least three times the average prices of competing companies. The reason is simple: imagine that after 3 years, you have in the protocol of the Expert Test written “need to replace the traction wheel of the elevator,” even though the traction wheel is slightly worn, and this need is more cunning than practical. At that moment, add 30,000 CZK to the costs of the “advantageously concluded contract” for a flat fee of 600 CZK excluding VAT per month. Even if you paid triple, it would take a whole 25 months for the prices to equalize.

References

References are created based on work, and when deciding which service company to choose, you are buying this work.

It is not always about a wealthy clientele or luxurious properties that the company manages. These types of references provide information that the company is capable of maintaining a certain standard of service, but can it maintain this standard for you?

Like in all industries, including the elevator industry, the size and level of the customer play a significant role. We have encountered several situations where the same company approached solving a problem completely differently depending on the client.

Ideally, you should be interested in references about the company from a customer of comparable size to you. Also, don’t forget about the scope of the service contract. Service programs (gold, silver, bronze, …) may differ in scope at some companies.

Years of Experience in the Market

This information does not need a lengthy explanation. It is understandable that if a company has been operating for decades and has references, it probably gained a lot of experience and is unlikely to go bankrupt overnight.

Local or Global

The size of the company is crucial information. Imagine a colossal company that, in addition to service technicians and accountants, has to pay human resources, development, machinery, halls, etc…

Under ideal conditions, you should receive a product with high quality, low price, and the certainty that you have a strong partner.

Reality is quite different. A multinational company in the elevator industry today means high prices, average/rather low product quality, low service quality, and an increasingly “closed” elevator system (worse availability of spare parts). This is probably due to poor organization, high employee turnover, the desire to earn as much as possible, and low-quality people in the field. If you are an employee in the field in such a company, you are not sufficiently motivated to do a good job. Workers of this kind often aim for a career advancement and, after a short time, disappear completely from the field. They become technical support for much less capable colleagues who were placed in their original position.

Given the high number of incompetent people, it is necessary to raise margins, while also leveraging the market position. You will probably prefer to hear that you have an elevator from a company that installed equipment in skyscrapers around the world rather than from František from Teplice.

But what if František from Teplice has been successfully completing elevators for the last ten years, or even manufacturing some parts himself? Everyone speaks highly of him, and everyone is enthusiastic about working with František. Of course, František does not work alone; he has his team of people whom he trusts.

Under such conditions, we would definitely recommend choosing to collaborate with František.