Commercial Customers - High Volume

This market segment is made up of customers who have high volume septage removal needs, i.e., condensate, no sewer hookups, etc., for relatively short periods of time, i.e., week or several months. The objective is to move high volumes on a regular basis and balance work loads to minimize equipment, drivers and on site storage.

You can see that each of these market segments require different policies and management tools to handle correctly. The most profitable situation is when you can schedule all your jobs in advance. Clearly your customers have a certain degree of flexibility, but asking a person to wait until "Next Tuesday" when the basement is flooding, will not work. This is why a mixture of customer types, where you can maintain a high customer service level and still run a profitable operation, is best.

Some of the key issues that business has to consider when deciding if they are going to schedule jobs vs. respond to customer demand scheduling are:

• Accepting different types of pumping work

• Using work orders to track jobs

• Selection and use of management tools for work orders, i.e., paper or electronic

• Telephone skills to manage customers’ requests for service

Scheduling customers correctly can mean the difference between running a profitable business and seeing your expenses outpace your income. The key point here is to plan ahead by knowing where you will be sending trucks and keeping enough flexibility in the routes to insert the on-demand customers and, if necessary, re-schedule the more-flexible maintenance stops to other days when the on-demand customers exceed your scheduled capacity.