“Who wants to leave home after dinner when you’re just sitting there all comfy?” Rob Ratta asks. But he admits emergency calls just come with the territory.
Rob is the third-generation owner, along with his wife Jen, of R.M. Ratta Corp. in Ayer, Massachusetts. They provide pumping, excavation and portable sanitation services with help from a staff of 15.
The company advertises that they’re available 24/7. “And that’s what we’re here for,” Rob says. He, Jen and team member Fred Ehwa take all the after-hours calls.
But not all emergency calls are true emergencies. “You can often talk the customer off the ledge,” Rob says. “Once they tell you what’s going on you can sometimes talk them through it — ‘Can you open that cover?’ ‘Yes. Open it up and let me know what you see.’ I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve been able to take someone who called with an inlet baffle plugged up with toilet paper and soap, and just tell them ‘Can you take a stick and just jam it down? It sounds crude but, trust me, you can save yourself a couple hundred bucks if you do it.’ And they do it.”
Of course Rob has a good idea which customers would be willing and able to give it a try and which ones wouldn’t, and not all problems have an easy fix, in which case he gets it taken care of.
“But if you can save a customer a hefty fee by solving a simple problem, you have a customer for life,” Jen says. “When they have to pay an emergency service fee on the weekend, that’s their groceries for the week. So if you can walk them through it, they like us even more. They won’t go anywhere else. A significant portion of our pumping business is repeat business.”
Rob emphasizes that answering the phone is so important. “Every town that touches us within 10 miles, we’re the number one company that gets called. You know why? Because we answer the phone. I don’t care if it’s midnight Sunday.”
Read more about R.M. Ratta Corp. in this month’s issue of Pumper magazine.
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