I dive into my thoughts on modern tech support in todays hvac trade. HVAC technician used to have a really good support network that has been taken away.
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I dive into my thoughts on modern tech support in todays hvac trade. HVAC technician used to have a really good support network that has been taken away.
Get 8% off at TruTech Tools with promo HVACTIME
https://www.trutechtools.com/?ApplyPromo=hvactime
techsupport@hvactimetx.com
hvactime@hvactimetx.com
Get tech support at hvactime.shop
Let's have a talk today about tech support and just how some things are changing in the, in the trade, and how some manufacturers are adjusting some of their strategies and what that's gonna do for us as technicians. How that's gonna help us, how that's gonna hurt us. And it is something that has shifted quite heavily over time.
You know, the tech support we have now. versus the tech support we had when I first started is not the same thing and a manufacturer's approach towards a service company. I just don't see them being the same. I don't know. Some of this conversation may be just me looking into certain things the wrong way, or it could also just me being naive and lacking experience.
I don't know. I would love some engagement from those who have lived this a lot longer. And who might be able to provide a better insight. But from my view, a lot has changed in how we are being worked with and how manufacturers are looking towards us. On the heavy commercial side, especially I, I see this less and, and maybe this is just my perception, but I see this less on the residential and maybe not even quite as much on the commercial side because from what I can tell, most of the manufacturers.
don't really provide that much service to those markets. In terms of physical personnel. When they provide actual support or people in the field under their direct brand, it's usually tailored more towards a heavy commercial or a industrial, especially style market. And that's where I've started to see some big changes over the years.
Towards how they wanna approach working with somebody like us. And we've had them completely walk away from us when things went bad and they've not even taken responsibility because of the cost involved. And it just, those, some of those things are, are more just nitpick situations. I, I, I'm not gonna stand on those specific things too much, but I do want to create a larger conversation around how it's shifted and just, I guess, give my thoughts.
I need a reason to talk and ramble and, well, here's a good reason for me to do so. In my early days in the trade and as a technician coming up and growing, you know, I, I felt that tech support was actually a real thing, and it was, it was actually beneficial. And I can remember how tech support actually really challenged me because at that time you had a lot of people that worked in tech support that honestly knew what they were doing.
And I felt at least it felt like as a young technician, that you were working with somebody. They typically had some form of hands-on experience themselves, and from what I understand, usually to get a role like that, not always, but a lot of those guys are, you know, say retired technicians. They're guys who went through the field and had actual field experience and instead of just going home and sitting on the couch, Transition into more of a field support role to where they could answer phones and help technicians that way.
And so when you got somebody on the phone, not always, but a lot of the time, they actually had the hands-on of exactly what you were dealing with. And one of the situations that really challenged me the most, that made me realize I needed to actually really focus on my education and grow myself. Was, I was calling the, it was a zone board controller, I think it was.
E C W is the brand. I forget the exact brand now. I'm pretty sure they're still out there today. But it was a zoning control for a small office building and I was trying to figure out how to wire it and it's, I mean, it's almost embarrassing now, but in, in some ways I'm not really embarrassed by it because it.
My lack of education, I didn't have, uh, a proper mentor. At least I hadn't got far enough along anyway. Uh, I was having trouble understanding how to wire this thing, and the controls wiring of it was really tripping me up on how to make it function with the thermostat to the air handler. And I got it far enough along that I had it all wired in, but I couldn't quite make it work the way I thought it was supposed to.
So eventually, I, I actually called the tech support line for the, that the manufacturer, that board, and started to talk to their guy on the phone and, He had some, honestly just very basic questions. And when I couldn't answer them, he kind of paused and he was, I could tell he was trying to be patient, but he was starting to get a little annoyed and he just, he sounded like that old school tech, you know what, what they sound like if you've ever worked with one.
He just, it's what they are. And, uh, he told me he. Do you have your supervisor around or somebody? And I said, well, honestly, no. For what I'm doing, I'm, this is it like I'm, it's, it's me. I gotta figure this out. And he goes, well, I really think you should call somebody else. And. I appreciated that. Now that's not really, you have to be careful, and maybe I'm going off on a rabbit trail here, but my point is from a tech support level, having somebody that could properly, um, give me some feedback like that because he had the experience to know when to tell me to stop.
Um, that actually triggered something for me that resulted in me signing up for school very shortly after that because I, I wa I was very embarrassed at the time. I can admit that now. And I knew that I never wanted to be in that position again. It was, it was, it was horrible, you know, without trying to be dramatic about it, but it really opened my eyes.
But going beyond that, you know, there's been several scenarios. Uh, you know, I've worked on some, like the Intelli packs. The intelli packs can get fairly complicated. So when I first started working on them and with them, you know, there's a lot of little details that goes alongside those, and there's multiple generations, and so there's little intricacies that are different between them.
So at that time, train offered a actual tech support line that you could call. I don't know the exact layout, but if I understood it correctly, and if I remember right, uh, most of the local offices had a kind of a local regional tech support people, and you would talk to those people and so they were, you know, regionally local to you and.
So, yeah, you could call in, get on the hold, you know, go through the normal tech support process, but they could really work you through some pretty complicated stuff, and that did a lot to help me. worked through some good situations that that gave me the experience I needed to get better at working on things like in tele packs and understanding how a train control system in their RTUs, especially when every freaking wire in there is one color black.
Granted, they label it all until all the labels wear off and you can't read 'em anymore, or their schematics wear out and then you can't see those. And then you can't find the proper schematics online because they don't really support their commercial ioms online the way that they do like some other stuff or other men.
Anyway, I'm gonna keep going. My point is, it was good. It was genuinely good. And we get a notification from our local supply house a few years back that, hey, um, we're closing it. You're not gonna have the tech support line available to you anymore. And that's exactly what they did. They, they closed them all down.
And at that time, I hadn't really seen a direct shift in how Trane was, uh, approaching us as a contractor yet. So it just seemed awful, awful strange to all of us. Like none of us could explain it. Even when we. go to talk to some of the counter guys and, and try to get some input from 'em. It just, nobody really wanted to talk about it.
And when that went away, they implemented this other, uh, group. And so they, it's not that they, I guess they didn't 100% do away with tech support, but they, they essentially closed it to third party. The only support that they would provide to third party was, well, officially it was 25 tons and lower, and you had to go to this online.
Site and submit a, uh, a request and then from that request they would reach out via email and if they found it valid enough, whatever you were dealing with at some point, I think they would actually call you. I never was able to get that far. I did send a couple of those emails when we were dealing with some, uh, just odd things here and there, and I also wanted to test the system once or twice just to kind of see what was going on with it.
This was years ago at this point, but I, I never actually, I never got really any kind of response from it. Granted, it was in its early days. Maybe they've got it improved by now, I don't know. But me personally, I didn't have a good experience with it now. I just kinda walked away from it from there. And we've recently talked about it, and some, in, one of my live streams I did on YouTube was, you know, nobody lo, nobody in the nation that I've talked to has.
Any kind of, uh, commercial tech support available to them. And part of what makes that worse for me, at least in my opinion, is the train is suffering from the same technician problems that we are suffering from as contractors. So when I've worked with some of their factory guys and, and their union in my area, I'm not, but you know, they are union and I, I understand the training process that you go through in the union.
But even with that process, their team themselves don't have enough experience to support whatever situation we're dealing with any better than we do. I do know that they do have their own in-house or behind the scenes tech support that they will service for themselves. And I've, I've seen that happen.
I've seen them be on site and call into their own people, but they're not people that we are given access to. And if we try to call them, You know, they basically just tell you no and hang up on you. So that's part of the frustration is they aren't any better off than we are, but yet we don't have access to the same support, and so now we're forced to call somebody out who has.
In some cases less experience than we do on site, just so that they could call tech support. But now we've gotta pay for that factory bill anyway, getting off track there. York is another one, so is Carrier. But especially York. York, uh, I don't remember having like a, a true. tech support line that you could just call directly into necessarily, but it wasn't hard to get in touch with their local, uh, service office and have somebody talk to you over the phone and work with you that way.
Whether it be a service manager or one of the technicians, uh, you had the ability. To work through some situations, and they were a lot more, uh, accommodating in that way. And carrier, carrier still has some form of tech support, but it's very hit and miss as to how, how beneficial it is. And I'll talk more about, uh, all, all three of those.
Because even with Carrier, even though they offer a tech support, there's some caveats to. Some other changes they've made on their commercial lines that's making that harder. But going back to the ex, the experiences working with the tech support, so Carrier, when we call them at this point, they honestly are kind of, it's, it's almost not like that same experience with train, except you're having it with somebody over the phone.
They've really don't know any more than you do because ultimately if you talk to 'em, They're just reading from the same IOM manual. and we can get those manuals and we can read that and interpret that just fine ourselves. And so now we've got somebody on the phone at this point who hasn't been through this.
I think that's part of what happened to Trane and some of the things that were going on. Was they, A lot of these manufacturers hit that boomer stage. Everybody is. Talked about for years now where they all retired, like legit, retired more than just from the field. When they retired, nobody was there to take their place and they, you know, it's not, that's not something you can just throw anybody into it.
It takes a, a large investment to get people back up to, uh, to a proper speed to be able to support that. Or you could be like some of the other manufac. That like the vr, vrf, vvs, were I pretty confident they have, uh, programs where they can do workflows and they essentially just input into that program, whatever symptoms you're telling them, and then it's gonna give them, uh, a workflow of things that they need to recommend and, and more questions they should ask.
I don't know for a fact that's how they're doing it, but I'm pretty confident just based off of how that conversation goes every time. , which essentially their program is nothing more than their service manual, which again, we already have. Just in a, in a different form. One of the good things about theirs is a lot of times they'll have actual, uh, specific parameters they can reference to you.
So I aka you know what the I G B T or the, uh, inverter gate, uh, tolerance is, should be, you know, they could sit there and actually articulate that to you in a way that sometimes the book doesn't tell you, and they don't put that in the service manual. The only way to get that. is to call in and ask. I've, I've had that before.
So a list of people that I know are actually still offering some form of tech support would be like Daikin would be LG Mitsubishi. Uh, I know that Samsung does, I know that, uh, carrier does for the Daikins. Uh, there's actually two different lines though. Like there's your Vrv side. , and then you have the chiller side.
And one caveat to the chiller side is you have to be a registered technician, meaning you've gone through their training and if you're working on a specific type of chiller, will they want you to be. Uh, registered, uh, as certified in that specific chiller. And if I understand their system correctly, uh, if you are not, if you haven't gotten certified on that series of chiller and you try to put a request in for it, and you send your technician reference number in with that request, which is typically via.
Uh, they may reject your request because you don't have that certification. I've not had that experience so far, but from what I understand, I think that's how it's supposed to work. It doesn't mean they, I don't think they automatically reject it, but I think that they're very likely to reject it if you don't have what they consider the proper credentials.
What's interesting about that chiller support though, is you're actually getting through to their chiller. Side, the people that, or the engineers that are helping design and actually work through that. So that's a pretty interesting experience because you actually get to talk to those people directly.
Uh, whereas like on the Vrv side, you, you just have this big call center with people with a computer in front of 'em, and I'm very confident majority of these people, Probably never worked in the field. Uh, not all of them. I, I think you, every once in a while you'll call somebody who I think has genuinely seen this before, in person.
Um, but I don't think the fast majority have. And so it's whatever training they've been given and how well they know how to work through their program itself is gonna determine what kind of experience you have. And it's been especially true with lg. LG has gotten better. They've gotten better, but LG historically has given me major fits and they've cost me a lot of money as a company because.
You will literally get a different answer depending on who you get on the other side of the phone. And I've literally had them sit there and disagree with each other, even though the, the parameters like I didn't have anything change on my side, but what information they're giving me ends up not being true.
And so I have to call back and try like, Hey, you know, you said this and this, and then the next guy's like, well, I don't know why he told you that. That didn't make sense. They was supposed to do this, this, and this. What do you mean? Or, uh, the prime example, uh, when I learned that for lg, if you replace any parts, they want you to replace, uh, basically all the boards in their fcu.
So if, if the, uh, blower motor goes out, um, they want you to replace the blower motor and the pcb, and, uh, there's one other board. I think there's some kind of, I'm drawing a blank now, but yeah, they're basically, if that motor goes out, they want you to do change, uh, that entire control cabinet, or I'm pretty confident.
He also told me if the PCB fails, they want you to go ahead and change out the blower motor because the PCB failed. Because what they've experienced is when one of those components fail, it typically damages the other components with it, and they want you to change the whole thing out. Well, the very first time I went through that, the guy didn't tell me that.
The very next guy did, uh, he told me that, but by that point it was already too late. And I'm already in a situation with the customer because they. Like they need this fixed. And we've already been waiting and like nobody LG related carries stuff locally. Anyway. I'm not trying to get off on a tangent about lg.
I, I've had some rough experiences with lg. I still like the equipment. They're still worth. working with for what they offer. They're not my first choice and they have gotten somewhat better. Another company that I know offers, uh, tech support in a general sense is blue on when Blue on first came out, uh, they seemed very residential focused.
And so when they first really started to hit the scene and get a name for themselves, I looked into 'em and what I discovered was they just didn't really have that much on the commercial side. And when you talk to them, they didn't have a lot of feedback commercially. Now, from what I understand though, they're, they did end up making some critical hires.
And getting the right people. I don't remember the names offhand, but right people on their team that helped develop their commercial support side. And it was from there that they've really started to build that end of it. Now do it. Are they gonna give you like legitimate chiller support and things? I very much doubt it.
I've never tried. , that might be a fun experiment. At some point, try to call him in and say, oh, hey, I've got a, a yk here and I'm dealing with the, uh, surging issue. What can you do for me? That might be a fun experiment. We'll see. Anyway, where I have had them give some good ex good help is, uh, a couple of my technicians have gotten into some fairly advanced RTUs that they've been able to provide some really good support for.
I actually had, uh, one of my guys, I think, um, he got in touch with him about a boiler. He was having a little bit of trouble with a boiler, wanted to bounce some ideas off of him. Ended up calling. And they, while they couldn't, they weren't able to actually like, tell him how to resolve his issue. They acted as a really good sounding board that they could help him bounce through his, what he did know in his training, and he was able to come to a, a proper conclusion.
Even though they weren't able to necessarily provide that conclusion. And what I think is interesting about that is that was a phone call that he didn't have to make to somebody else to take up their time in the company. And I think there, there could be some dangers to that in and of itself, but UL ultimately, uh, it, I guess, is more efficient because it's a free service.
And nobody else had to take time out of their day to support him in that moment, he was able to come to the right thing. And even on their V R F side, uh, they've started to get to where they could actually provide some fairly legitimate support. I've had a couple of my guys give me a call with some feedback saying, Hey, you know, the.
Uh, I was able to call Blue on and they said this and this and this, and it was like, oh, okay. You know, that, that actually, uh, had some merit to the feedback they had. So I can appreciate things like blue on and what they're doing to try to help fill a void here. And so if you haven't used them, There's still something I'm looking into, and I'm not gonna say I've, from a heavy commercial perspective, I've got a, a full on verdict for how I want to approach Blue on as a company, but I can definitely recognize the value that they're bringing and they have already brought value to, uh, the, my company or I say my company, you know, the company I work for and, and manage.
So let's talk a little bit about why these, uh, why'd like Train and York and Carrier. Have made these changes because they've, they've done something that, uh, others haven't, and that is make a hard lockout to their third party. Trane has done this on their heavy commercial side with their TU series or their uc, 400 and 800, just a uc controls lineup.
They've made it to where it is extremely difficult, if at all possible for a third party. to get their hands on that software. And even when you can get your hands on that software, it is very expensive. And I, I just, I, I don't agree with that, you know, and that's been against their historic model cuz they used to be able to have tech view and everybody could get tech view and tech view fine.
Maybe it wasn't the full blown version that a trained technician had. It was more than. To handle any, uh, essential job that a, a company needed to take care of in the field. Uh, and if, if it was something more than what tech view could do, then it was something you probably should have had train involved with to begin with.
And, and just my opinion and Carrier has started to do something very similar and or. Very, you know what carrier's doing is they're going through and installing these remote modules on all their equipment now, and I had that experience with one of my accounts where we went and put brand new chillers in.
They came out, did factory startup, and then a week after the startup, they randomly showed up on site. Didn't tell us, didn't really talk to anybody. They were able to get access to the chillers at that point. And, uh, the customer didn't know what was going on. They just assumed that, you know, it was, it was carrier as a factory.
Why, why would I not, uh, work with them? And that's what they did when they were there. They put these, you know, remote communicating modules. and they, they locked, they locked out the control system. Now, the carrier doesn't do like a, a legitimate hard lockout. Uh, you do have the ability to, I, I think you download the app and you can go in and a, and apply, um, or I guess, register each time you need to access the back end of it.
You know, a lot of times that leads to them asking questions as to, well, why do you need to do this? And essentially they'll generate a one time code that you can then use to get into the chiller to control it. And so it quite literally, every time we show up to do an inspection, now we have to go into the carrier system and go through this whole process just so that we can manually stage condenser fans and make sure that everything function.
Uh, in a controlled environment to where we know that what we're testing is an effective test. And I find that ridiculous. I mean, fine, you want to put a a, a generic password behind things fine. But with the way that carrier's doing it now, if they want to, they could just cut you off and say, no, you're not gonna get the password anymore, and you're done.
That's it. No. , uh, you're not gonna, you're not gonna have that. And, uh, York, uh, now I've not seen this myself, but I've gotten a lot of feedback from people around the nation that have started to have, uh, their control panels lock out to where you've gotta have a, if I understand correctly, you've gotta have a hard.
Key a u sb lock key to plug into these new boards, and I think they're doing it with a 36 30 board, which is their most recent series that have actual u sb, uh, sticks or, uh, drives on 'em that. They have to plug in in order to access the service settings and the old passwords that everybody's known for forever.
I mean, I mean, I, I , I think I mentioned the password in a recent video and somebody tried to give me trouble with it online. I'm like, dude, it literally takes 60 seconds to look up this password. And I, and I'm not somebody, I think there is a boundary between sharing that stuff too openly and. I think if, if somebody wants to go in and mess up what they have because they're trying to do something they shouldn't be doing cuz they don't understand it well enough, then to some degree I just say okay.
you know, that's a lesson you have to learn. Like I'm, you're gonna find a way to do what you're trying to do regardless. You know, the, the, the barrier that you're trying to cross is only gonna temporarily hold you back. I think that, and I do believe in like a, you know, without trying to get too political about it, I think there's a level of right to repair on this where, who are.
Who are we and who are the manufacturers to tell a customer that you are not allowed to have access to this because we can't trust what you're gonna do to it. When you're talking to the people who literally own this equipment, and if they break it, You know, they're responsible for that. At the same time, me as a third party, non-union, just Joe Blow what they commonly refer to as a rat shop.
I'm just, I'm, anyway, um, if I walk in there and I put this in and I do something very ignorant, And cause this machine to crash, I'm responsible for that. Even if I tried to deny responsibility, that customer could so easily just turn around and sue and get whatever work out of us that they needed to, and an overhaul would be worth a suit.
I mean, you're talking a hundred thousand dollars worth of work. So yeah, they'll sue you over that and you're gonna lose that case. The customer has a right to do that. But for a customer to have that right, that also means that, you know, we as third party also need access to that so that they have a right to hire us.
And I think that's what it comes down to because they stand behind this veil that, well, we're trying to improve customer experience and how we improve customer experience is we lock everybody out to where only our people can walk in and work on it. I talked earlier about the level of people that they have.
You know, they've, they, they're struggling with experience and manpower just like the rest of us. So I don't really buy into that. all that much, but that takes away the customer's ability to choose. And these manufacturers are quite literally charging twice the price than anybody else in our market. I mean, their, their pricing is, is ridiculous.
And, you know, yeah. They, they talk about, well, we are, you know, we're the manufacturer. We have all this training, we have all this stuff. We have da, da, da, da, da. We are the manufacturer. And I just, I have to call bs. I'm. Your, your technicians are not that good compared to everybody else. I'm not saying that everybody in the market should be able to work on it necessarily, or lemme rephrase that.
I'm not saying everybody in the market is equipped or prepared to work on it, but I think at the end of the day, it's not for you to decide who does and doesn't get to. It's up to the customer. And I guess that's where a lot of my base for some of this, uh, frustration goes back to. Taking away the customer's ability to get serviced.
And that's really, that's really what I care about. Like at the end of the day in my. I like this trade and I like serving people and I like making sure that people are taken care of and I care about people and that's what means the most to me and manufacturers because, and I think it's because of greed, are choosing to lock everybody else out of what is rightfully theirs so that they could have what they want and nobody.
Is allowed to play in their sandbox because that's money that they lose. I think there's been a period of time where the manufacturers have lost a lot of momentum and they've lost a lot of work and accounts because other people have gotten involved who aren't them, and the customers are getting more and more and more tight with their budgets because you know, economically they're having to, and so they're trying to squeeze more out of.
Out of every dollar. And so that means that they can't hire the manufacturer because their price tag is too high. And I don't think this is necessarily true for every single area. I think that there are some areas in the nation where maybe this is felt a lot less. I know that in my area in central Texas, we feel it heavily because we're a very non-union market and there is a huge amount of, uh, industry and tech coming into this region.
And so I do think that. Some of my experiences may be a little more exaggerated compared to everywhere else because they want such a big piece of the market that's pushing in, and it's one of those things where if they don't push in on it now, they're not, you know, they, they're not stupid. Like they, they want to get.
into that swing as it's swinging, and it's only increased as time has gone on. So I believe part of that strategy is by locking all these things down, they can push the competition out of the way so that the customer has no choice but going through them. And I think that's what's led to a lot of the, uh, manufacturers changing their stance on.
Who they're supporting and why they're supporting it. And we've even started to see this happen in the supply houses themselves, where they're not supporting the third party people or just the contractors, I guess I should say. The contractors, they're not supporting us contractors. The same way that they used to.
And we're finding that they're honestly withholding things at times because they want to have that in stock for themselves, I guess. Which, I mean, I guess to some degree, you know, I can't fault them too hard for, for some of that cuz they wanna take care of their customers and ultimately, I guess, They, they matter more, but aren't we also their customer?
It's just there's a whole, I guess, kind of paradigm there. The final result is the customer has less of a choice on what they do. I've even seen them go as far as when they're putting contracts in. To, uh, sell equipment, they're now requiring that they be the only ones to support that equipment during this warranty phase and during this timeframe.
And if the customer doesn't go with that, then they'll end up voiding the entire warranty on the system. And it's not been that way in the past. And part of where I could draw, draw extra struggle with that, that was part of the whole point behind. Us as the contractors getting certified on their equipment so that we could support their equipment all the way through its lifespan, if that's what the customer wanted us to do.
And I think economy has a lot to play into it. You know, the economy has been very up and down and I think that the. Corporate shareholders of these major manufacturers are applying a tremendous amount of pressure for them to really step in and start to rebuild their business and their industry in ways that they've, honestly, I think they've lost, and I'm not saying they lost it cuz they made a mistake.
I think it's just the market naturally went towards using contractors just due to pricing because I know that there was a. There was a day cuz I've, I've been told by the, by engineers and different people who have lived a very full life in this industry that it really, it honestly didn't matter. What they were paying for a a long time, there was a whole lot more attention put to who was doing the work and what work were they doing.
And it was in that environment that I think the manufacturers thrived because they could charge the prices that they deemed reasonable. And it didn't matter that the contractors ended up charging much less because the overall. Customer and their management team and whoever they were doing, they cared about who was doing the work.
At the end of the day, that's what mattered. And as that culture shifted, the manufacturers lost their share of the, uh, of the market. And I think this has been their, their strategy to take the market back, but I've seen. A consequence of this, and this isn't gonna be true across the board, but there are a lot of customers who are not willing to bow to the requirements and the stipulations that some of these manufacturers are putting on selling their products at this stage and the prices that they've put on them.
And so what I'm seeing is there's a lot. Of these smaller, more third party manufacturers. Dunham Bush is an example of this. Daikin is an example of this where they, they support all of the same stuff in most of the same markets. They're getting a foothold because they still provide. , the customer support, they still provide the tech support.
They still do all the things that these other guys used to do, but they're not trying to be boots on the ground, and I think that's the big difference. Is because they're not trying to directly compete with boots on the ground, and they're not trying to make, uh, margins an overhead that way. They want the contractor to be as prepared as possible so that we can do it the best job possible for that customer, for their brand and equipment.
And it's a. More unified experience, and so I'm starting to see that these other manufacturers are starting to get opportunities that used to not be able to because, uh, the customer doesn't want to live by the rules. Going with the, with what was the traditional options. And this is not the technician's fault, like the manufacturer texts.
Do not get me wrong. Please, I beg you, I'm not harping on anything y'all are doing. I know that I talked about a lack of experience and that's just pointing out a fact, and that's the fact. , every company out there in, in the current market is dealing with, there's not a company that's not having to do that.
So who I'm speaking towards and the people I'm calling out is the corporate management structures and the, and the people at the top end making these market decisions and making these choices that are taking away customer's choice. Pigeonholing everybody into whatever version of reality that fits their bottom line best, and those are the ones who I hold responsible for the current state that we have and why we're having such a hard time getting some of the resources we need to do a better job.
Because that's what it comes down to, doesn't it? Isn't it just about doing a better job and serving the customer? Right. It's really. . Not for a lot of people. For a lot of people it is just genuinely about money, and I guess that that's fine. You know, the world has a place for. Really just about everybody.
There's gonna be consequences to some of those choices made. Anyway, I could keep rambling on this. You know, I would love to see tech support restored to what I would consider its formal glory. Uh, I think a lot of people would, a lot. I think our industry would, was a better place. I think it was a better place when we.
Proper support through really good experienced people. I think that people like Daikin and LG and these call center tech support groups, uh, I think they're gonna get better. I know I'm very critical of them. Uh, I do believe in just when you're, when you're being critical of something that is, that is how things get better because my hope is that somebody's listening at some point somewhere.
And they can take some of these feedbacks and make it better. I can also hope that it will gives you a preparation so that when you start working with them, you have an idea of what you could expect things to happen and do and go. And by providing them more experience, by you working with them as a more educated customer yourself, it's going to allow them to continue to make improvements and, and hopefully, What everything's gonna come down to is just improvements.
Everything's gonna improve. I think this trade is going to continue to improve. I guess I just look forward to the day when we find that similar place that I feel like we used to have. It makes the barrier for entry for new people who want to get in this and get started a lot easier to cross. Because they don't have to have somebody who they're competing with and is nervous to share information and knowledge with them because you know they might get better than them.
Cuz that is still a thing that happens. I talk to plenty of people on a weekly basis. And there's still a lot of you out there that struggle getting your more senior people to help you because you're a threat to whatever they're doing. And there's a lot of you who haven't taken that road, and I appreciate you and I hope that you would continue to do do that.
And encourage others to be more open and transparent and be willing to help one another to get better. Because as each one of us improves and does better at our trade, we all continue to get better because believe me, there is more than enough work for all of us to be very successful in this industry.
And if we want to continue to attract people to join this industry, we have to make the environ. Very welcoming. And welcoming in ways that it wasn't for a very long time. The trades themselves as a whole were very closed off and were not very healthy environments, in my opinion. And that is something that has changed with the work that I've seen others do.
Like, uh, what I've seen Craig. Um, bill Spoon and Brian Orr, you know, these have been voices in the industry who don't see things the way that they used to be seen, and they've actively taken a, a place to have a voice that has reshaped how we look at a lot of things in this industry in a, in a, in a better way.
And I appreciate the work they do, and I would encourage you. To pay attention to that and find a way that you could become a part of that process. I appreciate it. Everybody. M t t, take care of your family. Spend time with your kids. We're gonna be going into summer here soon. It's not that much further down the road.
And as always, things are gonna get busy. Things are gonna be crazy. It's gonna be a lot to deal with. And we, yeah, now's your time to get rest, get prepared and be ready to go into. The, the next summer season, uh, for some of you up north, I think the winter season tends to be kind of a crazy one for you as well.
Maybe your summer is lighter and it's not as big of a deal. I'm not sure. I'm not from that world. So, uh, whatever your slower season is, enjoy it and use the time wisely. I appreciate everybody. I'll see y'all on the next one.