Plumbers

Nick Papadopoulos knows that it isn’t just fire fighters, police and ambulance drivers who respond to emergencies. “My sons and I run a plumbing service, but we specialize in handling urgent and emergency calls. It may be a rare thing that someone’s life is in danger, but even on little calls the risk of property damage can be really high.”

As a small businessman with a big responsibility, Nick knows that being there for his customers when they need him is the most important thing he can do. “We don’t have the budget of a fire department or ambulance company. So keeping our office staffed 24 hours a day just wasn’t possible. I tried an answering service, but it just didn’t work. Half the time they’d pronounce our name wrong, or get the customer’s message wrong. And I can’t tell you the number of times some new switchboard operator would set the message aside to handle another call and then just forget to call us. It was a nightmare.

“Genie and the Universal Office solved all that. Genie never mispronounces my name, she always gets the customer’s call right and she never has to set MY business aside to handle another call. Between my sons and me, one of us is always available and on-call. We use multiple ‘greetings’ and Genie just swaps them around for us depending on the time and day. My son Little Nick set that up, but even I could have done it. Oh – don’t tell him I said that – he hates being called Little Nick”.

Nick goes on, “Anyway, when I’m on, the calls go to me first, and then to one of the boys if I don’t pick up. If one of my sons is on, he gets the call first. If none of us can take the call, then Genie takes a message and we all get paged. Just the other night, I got a panicky call from Mrs. Coleman at the art gallery. Seems her basement had flooded. They stopped the water, but they needed one of our big pumpers to clear the water before it reached some of the stored paintings. I knew Little Nick was – dang – uh; Nicholas had the right rig out, so I just pushed the call straight on to him.

“With our Universal Office, I have complete control. Like when my pain-in-the-butt nephew calls about a job: I just forward his calls straight to my wife, cause he’s her brother’s kid. And it’s right back to my real business.”