Apologising is not a maintenance plan

In a building in Rehab, the lift breaks down every few weeks, and every few weeks the same man from the maintenance company arrives, apologises warmly, fixes it and leaves. The residents like him. He remembers their children's names. He is very good at calming people down.

He is also the most expensive part of the arrangement, though nobody counts him that way. Every visit answers a fire already burning: an old woman stuck on the stairs, a father carrying shopping up five floors, a phone call that begins angry. The company has organised itself around soothing people after the promise has already broken.

The same effort could go somewhere else. Look at why the lift keeps failing and change the routine that lets it, so a small fault is caught on a quiet morning visit instead of discovered by a tenant at nine at night. Make the promise simple and specific, a check on the first of each month and a technician within two hours, so everyone knows what to expect and the company knows exactly what it owes. Then put the care into the parts and the work itself, because a lift that does what was promised needs nobody charming to explain why it did not.

Keeping a promise turns out to be far cheaper than apologising for breaking it. The apologies never stop coming. The repaired routine pays for itself and keeps paying.

Calming an angry customer is a real skill. Running something that rarely makes them angry in the first place is a better one.