Friends Watches

[JohnR725]

8 hours ago, oldhippy said:

My advice and you probably wont like it. Don't touch family or friends watches or clocks. It can cause nothing but trouble not because the items aren't yours, but to save all the bickering and bad feeling that comes with it. Here is an example a member of family is charged £30 for servicing his/her watch, another has a watch serviced and is charged £45 because you had more to do. Word gets around the family,they don't see it that way and it causes ill feeling in the family.   The same goes with friends. 

notice in this example the problems with charging money what if no money had exchanged hands on this?

families are always very interesting with how they handle money situations. Some families are very good I'd especially when somebody dies dividing up stuff everybody's happy there's no problem in other families well the family ends and they never a talk ever again or they're unhappy for ever because of somehow they got shortchanged in the universe. At least with friends you can hopefully find new ones but losing your family over seemingly silly little things isn't necessarily a silly little thing to happen.

 

 

10 hours ago, RichardHarris123 said:

Many years ago I was a plumber.  Let's say I replaced the taps on the basin, next day I would get a phone call stating that the sink taps were dripping and they weren't before I changed the basin taps????

when I was in school learning watch repair the instructor explained the importance of proper paperwork. In other words whatever is done to a customer's watches documented. Customers are interesting they remember paying money for something not always quite sure what they paid for. Like they got their crystal polished and now the watches running wonder whose fault that is? So it's very helpful if you can demonstrate that according to the document here we polished your crystal and advised you that you should get your watch repaired because it needs to be serviced as opposed to now you're servicing the watch for free because you didn't document anything.

Shop that I work at all incoming items are photographed everything is documented. Quite a few times that document is really saved our whatever expressly with engraving jobs where somebody was careful to document the item was scratched or is cracked or was broken or something as opposed to did we do that? Documentations extremely important and I bet you on all these hobby fun jobs are not thinking about photographing the item writing it up maintaining books and documents after all this is a fun project are just going to help your boss out or something

12 hours ago, gpraceman said:

I do like the idea of having a frank discussion with them

yes we all like this but part of this discussion is it never goes 100% that way. We explained all of our customers that everything we now touch is going to take at least six months or longer. We have a huge backlog of watches. So everything is carefully explained and do they understand 100% of the time? notice part of this discussion is well basically playing Russian roulette. Most the time things will turn out fine but that tiny percentage of somebody who doesn't understand or somebody who doesn't want to understand. Or somebody who's going to always be unhappy no matter what. We are doing these repairs for fun having lack of fun and permanent unhappy friend relative whatever not really what you want to be doing. At least we doing this commercially if they go way it's just a lost customer that's still an issue but it's not a lost spouse or maybe a spouse to now complains to every single day because her brother's watch doesn't work right or something. Even if you did explain all of it were dealing with the percentages is a tiny percentage of bad that will come of working on other people's stuff if you're not doing it as a professional. Then even if you're doing it as a professional that are still a tiny percentage of unhappy customers it set tiny percentage that ruins it for everybody and you really want to deal with them if you don't have to especially when watch repair is supposed to be a fun hobby