How Firefighting Can Teach Customer Service

Greg Crumpton lives by a simple mantra: Relationships drive business. Each week on Straight Outta Crumpton, Crumpton dives into the lost art of networking and speaks with the biggest influencers in business services to learn how they build, nurture and value their professional relationships.

On this episode of Straight Outta Crumpton, Hosts Tyler Kern and Greg Crumpton talk with Butch Dee, a Customer Service Instructor at Steamfitters Local Union 449. The trio talk about customer service and how important it is in any industry.

The affable Crumpton met Dee when he brought Butch in to give some soft skills training for his company’s technicians. Both men are passionate about customer service and its importance in life and business. For a lot of years, Butch was a fire chief at a local volunteer fire company. He read some books about fireground command. One of these books was “The Essentials of Firefighter’s Customer Service,” by Alan Brunacini.

Dee found that a lot of the principles in the book apply to his life and what he does in work. A boss asked him to present some of the book to a training session. He started doing presentations on the book, and he was brought on to do the customer service training program for Local 449.

“We’ve produced 13 customer service training videos that are industry specific,” Dee said. These videos focus on areas of customer service , such as conflict and professionalism. One of those was mimicked on one of Stumpton’s former companies, which is now owned by Service Logic. 

Dee talked about how important customer service is in a career.

“When you think about essential services, which HVAC contractors are considered essential services, as are firemen and policemen,” Crumpton said. “You never think about someone taking the bull by the horns in a fire department setting and thinking about customer service. I think we take that for granted.”

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