Imagine booking a flight and the airline telling you the flight was scheduled to take-off between Noon and 5:00 pm. Or scheduling a doctor’s appointment and being told to come on in at 8:45 am and the doctor will see you sometime between 9:00 am and Noon. I’m guessing that you wouldn’t be too thrilled.

Yet somehow some insurance adjusters believe that it is okay to do just that when servicing an insurance claim. 

The same thing often happens when we schedule a plumber, a painter, a flooring provider or a range of other contracting related services for our home. It seems the "norm" is to provide service windows.

This makes no sense.

In an age of always on communications including cell phones, texting, global positioning systems (GPS) there are no reasons for there ever to be more than a 1 hour service window, and in most instances, there shouldn’t be any service window.

I was meeting with a now “former” service provider on Friday who admonished me for scheduling his teams at 9:00 am. He stated that we don’t know the first thing about the business, that contractors can’t be punctual and that we had to provide them with multi-hour service windows. Well, needless to say, we are no longer working together!

There is no doubt that things can happen during the course of a day. Someone can get tied up on a job, they can hit traffic, there can be an emergency, but any of these things can be managed through pro-active communication. Why should your time as a customer be any less valuable than the time of the service provider? It shouldn’t! Just say no to service windows.