I was excited when the service provider hired to handle a FIFA World Cup event in Kansas City agreed to work with PRO for an article. The big contract, large venue and an event that spanned multiple weeks was sure to make an interesting story.
I won’t spoil this month’s On Location article, but I will preface it by saying everything went great for the operator and event organizers were very pleased. That got me thinking though, what if they weren’t?
What if an event organizer calls in a high-stakes panic because holding tanks are overflowing, a luxury trailer has lost water pressure or multiple units have been tipped over? What if their knee-jerk reaction is to unleash that built-up stress on whoever answers the phone?
These calls will catch anyone off guard and it’s natural to respond by putting up a defensive wall. Deflecting blame, citing the original contract or reminding the client that they underordered for their crowd size may be the immediate reaction. And while everything they say may be true, it is best not to react on the caller’s level.
Train your dispatch team to be steady, calm and completely focused on a solution rather than debating who caused the crisis. By simply acknowledging the client’s high-pressure situation and shifting the focus to immediate stabilization, your staff can de-escalate the panic and turn a hostile confrontation into a collaborative effort to fix the site.
Have their back
Helping the client is obviously a priority, but it should never come at the expense of your team’s well-being. Frontline dispatchers can take an immense amount of emotional wear and tear during peak event season, and they need explicit backing from ownership to know where the line sits between a stressed customer and an abusive one.
Giving employees permission to firmly state that they need constructive communication to coordinate a service truck, or authorizing an immediate hand off to management if profanity enters the conversation gives your team a sense of control. When staff know leadership genuinely has their back and won’t force them to sit through verbal abuse to save a contract, office morale stays intact and calls are handled with confidence rather than anxiety.
Chaos to loyalty
An organizer in the middle of a crisis rarely describes the problem accurately. They tend to exaggerate and make the situation sound much larger or worse than it truly is. Equipping your phone staff to quickly cut through the noise and diagnose the true severity allows you to dispatch field resources strategically without wasting valuable driver hours.
Once the immediate fire is out and the weekend wraps up, the real work of account retention begins. The positive side of an angry customer is the chance to show your company’s true colors and step up to the customer service plate. Make sure dispatches are ready to embrace the opportunity to turn a disgruntled client into a lifelong one.
Following up with a calm, constructive debrief after the event transforms a chaotic incident into a demonstration of your company’s reliability. Reviewing the actual site usage data together not only helps the organizer plan and budget correctly for next year’s event, but it seals your reputation as a calm, indispensable partner who delivers when things get tough.
Large-scale events will always test your equipment, your drivers and your dispatch team’s patience. But getting the process down means big contracts for the business and the true measure of a portable sanitation company isn’t whether problems happen, but how they are handled when they do.
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