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Alan Brunacini's Customer Service for the Fire Service · B Shifter

• 0:44
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the B-Shifter podcast.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: We've got Nick, we've got Terry, we've got Vance.
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: We're hanging out today talking about customer service, which is a great topic, one that Bruno was very passionate about, and I know it makes us all better.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: So looking forward to digging into this one today and talking about some resources that we have for people to help them out with customer service within their organization as well.
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: So, first of all, how are you guys?
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: doing.
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: I'm fine, he's dandy, we're fine and dandy.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's the go-to vaudevillian intro.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: That's an interesting shirt you have on there.
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: Thank you for bringing the shirt up.
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: Let me get a better shot of that.
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: There we go.
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: My daughter and grandson bought me this shirt and apparently it's Deadpool riding a unicorn cat with rainbows and all kinds of different colors.
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: So I've been wearing it for about two years now.
• 1:46
  Speaker 3: Actually, probably time to put it away.
• 1:48
  Speaker 3: Their big thing is every holiday they give me a different kind of shirt and kind of dare me to wear it and this one.
• 1:54
  Speaker 3: I've received a lot of good comments.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: It's the first time I've seen it.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, it's nice.
• 2:00
  Speaker 3: Thank you, Nick.
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: What do you think of it?
• 2:02
  Speaker 4: Two years, it's pretty good.
• 2:03
  Speaker 3: I take care of my stuff, Nick.
• 2:05
  Speaker 4: You do.
• 2:05
  Speaker 4: This is a shirt I got when I worked on Ladder 11.
• 2:09
  Speaker 4: That's like 30 years ago.
• 2:12
  Speaker 4: Wow yeah, I found it in the bottom of a box is why I still have it.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: And my shirt was provided by Blue Card, but I am wearing an undershirt.
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: That is my FAFO shirt, now available at the B Shifter store.
• 2:29
  Speaker 4: Do you ever feel like Kanye?
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: I'm just influencing so much.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: You're an artist out of clothing air.
• 2:39
  Speaker 4: Are you going to start dressing?
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: Allison in foamy things.
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: Maybe I do already.
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: Follow me on Instagram.
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: Exactly, can we all get hats?
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: Are you going to start dressing Allison in foamy things?
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: Maybe I do already.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: Woo, baby.
• 2:45
  Speaker 4: Follow me on.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: Instagram.
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: Exactly Can we all get hats?
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: Straight build.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: So customer service, I think, is a topic that when Bruno introduced it to the fire service, it wasn't really a fire service topic.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: As a matter of fact.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: We'd go on a lot of calls and our customer service was pretty poor a lot of times.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: And you know, I always use the example.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: I'm in the firehouse one day and the phone rings and the captain answers it and says yeah, yeah, well, is it on fire?
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: Well, you got the wrong number then.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Well, this lady called in distress because a raccoon had been ran over by a car in front of her house and she wanted the spca phone number.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: And this was before the internet, right, um, and just, she was like, well, maybe the fire station down the street will help me.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: And uh, we pretty much told her we weren't gonna help her.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: And it's like, well, that wasn't very nice.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: No, if we would have just given her the phone number or said you know, the spca would have taken care of that and it would have taken 30 seconds to be nice and be helpful.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: So we we tried to shift the paradigm after that and tried to treat our customers a little bit better, and a great guide for that is the customer service book from Bruno.
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: So let's talk about that a little bit and some of the elements that went into the to the making of all of that.
• 4:03
  Speaker 4: Well, he had a like this customer service idea.
• 4:08
  Speaker 4: I guess you know maybe we should stop looking at the people we deliver service to as victims and more like customers and that may redefine the relationship a little bit between us.
• 4:20
  Speaker 4: And I think part of it was that is, he was trying to de-victimize our customers somewhat Because we were.
• 4:27
  Speaker 4: And he said this he says up to that point.
• 4:31
  Speaker 4: He says we delivered service to a force of nature.
• 4:35
  Speaker 4: He says the fire was our customer.
• 4:38
  Speaker 4: He says we never.
• 4:38
  Speaker 4: And he said we were mean to people but that wasn't the focus of our work.
• 4:43
  Speaker 4: We were more of a.
• 4:44
  Speaker 4: We protected the community against fire, not the people in it so much.
• 4:49
  Speaker 4: And then he said as far as like, because he was always like a student of leadership and managing things and stuff like that the comment he kept making is until I figured out the concept of customer service and that the fire department actually did deliver service to other human beings.
• 5:08
  Speaker 4: And that's really kind of where I learned the most about being a leader and how that affected what we did organizationally.
• 5:18
  Speaker 4: So I mean he came up with it and I remember I don't know I was a captain, I had been for a little while and he would have captain's meetings.
• 5:29
  Speaker 4: He loved having captain's meetings.
• 5:32
  Speaker 4: I think that was his favorite thing was meeting with captains, because they were high enough in the organization that they would say anything that hit their mind and you know they had enough protection where they didn't have to worry about being reassigned.
• 5:42
  Speaker 4: They were union members and you know they had enough protection where they didn't have to worry about being reassigned.
• 5:44
  Speaker 4: They were union members, oh exactly, and he was really more of a union president than a fire chief.
• 5:48
  Speaker 4: So I mean, it was just the perfect deal.
• 5:50
  Speaker 4: And it was on B-shift, so you had all the people that had some type of a head injury in the room together at the same time, so he had us all captive.
• 5:59
  Speaker 4: And he brings up this concept and I for like I don't know 45 minutes.
• 6:04
  Speaker 4: They argued we already do this.
• 6:08
  Speaker 4: But it wasn't.
• 6:10
  Speaker 4: It was a productive and positive meeting, I think, which kind of he scratched his head over and thought man, the b shifters didn't kill me over this, and so I think it.
• 6:19
  Speaker 4: Just he kept pushing it out there and he kept going with his meetings and it turned into the book.
• 6:24
  Speaker 4: He wrote on it and then it became a thing in the fire service.
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, if you look at the book and we'll go into maybe a little bit of depth in the chapters it's actually some of the reasons.
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: He kind of made negative statements positive.
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: He heard some of the reasons why we felt like customers weren't important and how we treated them and how we viewed them and he kind of turned that around and made a positive statement out of it and then wrote a section on that and it made a lot of sense.
• 6:55
  Speaker 3: But I remember those meetings too and I remember when he first kind of because you go down, you you wanted to hear bernice saying, yeah, I mean, it was a time in our career when you were a fire captain and we get to go listen to the fire chief.
• 7:09
  Speaker 3: And you go listen to the fire chief and he opens up.
• 7:12
  Speaker 3: And I mean he was a guru of innocent command and we want to talk fires and we were heroes and all that.
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: And he opened up with let's have a discussion about people and customers and you could just feel you could hear the room just kind of suck all the air go.
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: Oh, what's he got for us now?
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: But by the time you left there and you, an hour and a half later, you didn't want the meeting to end because you're still talking about it and you're you're kind of moving the subject forward.
• 7:41
  Speaker 3: But he was so good at that and and he would always ask the obvious questions like is somebody would say something negative about, um, this, the customer service concept?
• 7:53
  Speaker 3: And he, well, why wouldn't you?
• 7:54
  Speaker 3: You know he went back to that well, why wouldn't you be nice to him?
• 7:58
  Speaker 3: Well, why wouldn't you treat him?
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: And there's no answer for that other than well, I'm going to be an asshole so I'm not going to do that and he always came back to that.
• 8:07
  Speaker 3: It made a lot of sense for us.
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: So, you know, as we were going through our silverback leadership, we used the heck out of this book.
• 8:17
  Speaker 3: I mean, we, how we say, we repackaged this book and a few other books.
• 8:23
  Speaker 3: But this is really one of the the baselines of that silverback leadership program, because the customer we start with first, with the work, and then we move directly into the customer, the inside, outside customer service.
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: So when he was talking about the customer, he was talking about mrs smith, but he was also talking about how we treat each other in the organization.
• 8:43
  Speaker 3: I think this book focuses more on the Mrs Smith concept.
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: But yeah, that was come along about the same time, wouldn't?
• 8:55
  Speaker 4: you think, yeah, he wrote the book in 96, but he started talking about it in like probably the early 90s, before it became a book.
• 9:04
  Speaker 4: And then at that point he was connected with Ifstamore.
• 9:08
  Speaker 4: He was doing stuff with them.
• 9:10
  Speaker 4: So they wanted to publish the customer service book and so they made it part of their essential series, so they called it the Essentials of Fire Department Customer Service.
• 9:21
  Speaker 4: So they had the book since it was published in 96.
• 9:25
  Speaker 4: And then we took it over, I don't know, probably two or three years ago they weren't doing anything with it anymore and it had gone out of print and they had some copies left and they didn't know what to do with the residuals that they had.
• 9:39
  Speaker 4: So they contacted us and we said, yeah, we want all that back, thank you.
• 9:42
  Speaker 4: And at the time they asked would you you know this was part?
• 9:47
  Speaker 4: We were going to do some stuff with this under the essentials title, would you mind taking that off?
• 9:50
  Speaker 4: And we really didn't.
• 9:50
  Speaker 4: We thought, yeah, that's fine.
• 9:51
  Speaker 4: So we.
• 9:53
  Speaker 4: The only change to the book that we reprinted here just recently is it's fire department customer service, so we lost the essentials out of there.
• 10:02
  Speaker 4: And it's fire department customer service, so we lost the essentials out of there.
• 10:04
  Speaker 4: And when we reprinted it we didn't do the spiral bound, we printed it like a traditional hard spine, perfect bound book.
• 10:10
  Speaker 4: But other than that, the book, the paper's probably a little bit better, it's a better quality book than the older one was and it's the same book.
• 10:20
  Speaker 4: In fact, when my dad was alive we talked about revising it because Oklahoma had and we thought, well, we'll take it back over and you can do like a second edition.
• 10:28
  Speaker 4: And he looked at it and he says I don't know what I changed in it, to be honest.
• 10:32
  Speaker 4: And we started looking at it and thought, well, no, why would you?
• 10:38
  Speaker 4: There's certain books they've never changed for a reason because they're really good and so we'll just keep it as it is.
• 10:43
  Speaker 4: I mean, you put new stories in it and fresher things, but it's the same concept and they're no better than what's there now.
• 10:50
  Speaker 3: You know, it's interesting because now when we talk about customer service and we talk about Mr Smith, nobody's surprised by that.
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: But there was a time in the 80s right when I think it might have been the early 90s, but I'm really bad with time for us.
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: But anyway I I went to a midwestern city to talk about fire attack and this midwestern city was trying to figure out exactly what was boise I went to boise and they were trying to figure out exactly, you know, how to move forward with fire attack.
• 11:23
  Speaker 3: So I was bringing kind of what we were doing with the fire command piece and they had invited the New York firefighters there too and they were coming in and they were talking about the New York system, which was different from ours.
• 11:35
  Speaker 3: You know, they work off a task level system and ours was more of a decision-making model and you had choices not as much as we have today, but there was a difference in the system and I went first.
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: So you have the Boise command team and a beautiful facility and a bunch of captains and some firefighters and I get up and I start talking about the fire attack and the way that we would do it in Phoenix, and at one point I said, you know, and then the customer, and they were all listening pretty well until I said and then you have the customer that would come up and they're like what did he just say?
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: I mean the entire room kind of changed.
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: Did he just call them customers?
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: We call those taxpayers, right.
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: And there was a couple other words and I took and I sit up there and I took some abuse from those guys and you know the way firefighters abuse each other with a lot of love, right and um.
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: It was pretty interesting I've never forgot that that that I used a word that I had been using for years and years and I used it outside our system and people were and the word was customer and the people are like, oh, you can't call them customers, they're not customers and of course they've transitioned from now and they provide customer service and everybody else does in the country.
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: But this book will help really identify the best way to kind of look at your customer, to how you deliver that service, and really it's still perfect.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: Well, it's such a good reminder because I think that there are a lot of industries where customer service has been slipping pretty fast in the last four or five years, a couple.
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you know you can't get anybody on the phone.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: No one wants to help you.
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: They just want to separate you from your money.
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: So I think, with us reintroducing this to everybody and keeping us focused on why we're really here because we are in the customer service business right, I mean, we're providing a service, we're not providing a good, we don't sell anything.
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: It's a service that we provide.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: So having a guideline to help us through that and also help educate some of our folks on why we want to behave in that way, I think is really good.
• 13:46
  Speaker 3: And Bruno used to say you know, if you wanted a plumber or you wanted a painter or you wanted somebody to work on your car, you would go out and meet a couple people and maybe interview them and maybe look up and see how well they do or how they treat their customer.
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: But when you get the fire department, the customer gets whichever fire company shows up that day, and then that fire company is representing the entire organization in many ways, representing the American Fire Service right, and so customers don't have a lot of choices when they ask for a fire department service.
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: So we've got to make sure that we provide a really effective customer service across the board.
• 14:26
  Speaker 4: Well it was.
• 14:26
  Speaker 4: He started in the early 90s.
• 14:30
  Speaker 4: He broached the idea of customer service they're not victims and then he took that, and then the fire department would reinforce those kind of like after action reviews where some crew delivered a high level of customer service to somebody.
• 14:51
  Speaker 4: So that kind of became recognized in the department as a direction we wanted to go.
• 14:58
  Speaker 4: And so after two or three years of being bombarded by a customer service radiation, you just didn't feel it anymore and you thought, okay, it's the customer, I get it.
• 15:09
  Speaker 4: He wants to go out and add value, and you know core services first, and then, if we can do a little something to, you know, make their day better.
• 15:16
  Speaker 4: That's what you do.
• 15:16
  Speaker 4: You know, within the context of what that going on with that incident?
• 15:20
  Speaker 4: Well so, and not everybody agreed with it in the fire department, there were some people better at it than others.
• 15:28
  Speaker 4: But I think it hit a milestone, at least in my mind, when I was at work one day and they delivered the mail and it was Friday, so they delivered all the mail and it was payday.
• 15:38
  Speaker 4: So that's when all the checks come in and all the mail gets put in everybody's slot, and so you sit down and you're reading the buck slip, which was tremendous because you were going to get to the back pages where all the drama laid.
• 15:50
  Speaker 4: But there was a.
• 15:53
  Speaker 4: I had my check and there was a thing stapled to it and I thought what the hell is this?
• 15:57
  Speaker 4: And I pulled it off and it was a booklet that was I don't know.
• 16:01
  Speaker 4: It was probably six inches by four inches and 20 pages long, and the union president had wrote a customer service guide.
• 16:11
  Speaker 4: So Alan Brunicini wrote a customer service book and then our union president followed that up a couple years later with a guide.
• 16:18
  Speaker 4: So when you're on an incident, this is what you need to remember and you know they're not an interruption, they're the reason we're here and doing what we're doing.
• 16:27
  Speaker 4: And so I loved the visualization of that being stapled to your paycheck and saying you get this because you do this, yeah.
• 16:38
  Speaker 4: And you thought, yeah, that does it, that is a perfect thing.
• 16:42
  Speaker 4: So I mean it just kind of it connected the dot on the back end and it made it where okay, I guess the fire chief and now the union president, mom and dad.
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 16:56
  Speaker 4: I guess all the people who don't want to do this can line up over there and, yeah, be ostracized by the rest of the fire department now.
• 17:02
  Speaker 4: So what they did is they made it cool to be a good firefighter basically, it wasn't like a sissy thing to do, to treat people nice.
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: It was the right thing to do.
• 17:12
  Speaker 4: Let me take that back.
• 17:13
  Speaker 4: You were going to be a good firefighter, but now they were expecting you to also be a good human being is what it was.
• 17:21
  Speaker 4: So the core of your service is I.
• 17:23
  Speaker 4: You're a good firefighter because you do this well this part, you can do the job of a firefighter.
• 17:29
  Speaker 4: That's what makes that, but the added value is really kind of what humanizes the service that you're delivering, and there's parts of the book where he's.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: He really tells us that in order for us to provide good customer service, we've got to be good at our jobs too Skillful, execute a good outcome.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: We can't show up and not know what we're doing, so an element of this is being a good human, and part of being a good human is being able to execute and have a good outcome and provide great service and know what we're doing when we get there.
• 18:01
  Speaker 4: Yeah, connect with the customer on a human level, and he would say it.
• 18:05
  Speaker 4: He says Mrs Smith has her kitchen fire.
• 18:07
  Speaker 4: She's never written me a letter about the way we ventilated her house or the way we manipulated those turbojet fog nozzles.
• 18:14
  Speaker 4: That's never it.
• 18:15
  Speaker 4: It's how quick we got there and how nice we treated her.
• 18:18
  Speaker 4: Once we solved her problem, what?
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: we did is that we took advantage of people who got it early and everybody didn't get that.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you're going to do staging, you've got to all stage together.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: I mean there has to be kind of a uniform approach in response to staging.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Let me just use that as kind of a silly example maybe.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: But when you say be nice, the whole organization isn't going to be nice at exactly the same minute.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: Not that they weren't nice before, but they really did not embrace that as much of an idea or a concept or a behavior.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: Some people did Like anything, some people got it very early and what we did is that we celebrated and publicized what they did and those became a lot of the directive things in the program.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: In other words, somebody would provide sort of social service, which is food, shelter and transportation.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: When they did that, we would have a family that had a fire and were homeless.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: A battalion chief and two captains got the resources to put those people up, be sure the kids got to school the next day, connect them to the resources that it took to do kind of medium-range recovery.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: In the process we would take those stories and we would distribute them throughout the organization so that those people became kind of the customer service heroes in the system.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: Well, the rest of the workforce would see that and would connect to it.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: Some were slower than others in the sense of, well, I don't know if I'm ready to do that yet, but at least it got people sort of connected and involved and thinking and seeing what was possible and notice what does it mean when you say, be nice?
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: Well, what it means is is if you have a family that's standing there and they don't have any place to sleep that night, what it means is is provide that service to them and use the resources that we have available.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: And the community was terrific and given us those resources.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: You've been through the same thing in your departments and people said, oh, that's what it means.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: If Mrs Smith is standing there with a flat tire, kind of scratching her head, pull in behind her, change the tire for her, and we would put those experiences on television, we would write commendations, we would publicize that through the system, we would embarrass the people who did it and I mean that in a positive kind of way by thanking them and making that kind of more of a public kind of a thing.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: So it caught on.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: It's just sometimes it was almost we can top that.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: Watch what I do on this one.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: We did a lot of stuff on loss control.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: We bought smaller tools, we bought boxes, we bought salvage material, we bought carpet cleaners.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: We bought wet vacs Again, you did the same thing.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: We would dispatch a special unit to help them with.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: That Didn't cost very much, but it was added value that people really remembered and it was the cheapest part and it was the least expensive part that produced the biggest memory impact.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: So we started to say that the basic core service gets us in the door.
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: The little extra is what they remember, and a lot of times the extra was just that the firefighters were nice to the customers, they were polite, they connected to them, they were patient with them.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: It wasn't that we delivered a huge amount of added value every day.
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: Once in a while you got a chance to do that, and those are the stories that you would get in the newspaper and that people would tend to repeat.
• 22:02
  Speaker 4: And he talks about.
• 22:03
  Speaker 4: This is the way that you represent this to the outside, and he meant, like you're city masters, as he says, you don't have to do this the customer does and that becomes a very powerful loop.
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: Then I actually used all that applying for jobs as a fire chief.
• 22:22
  Speaker 3: When you're sitting across from the mayor of Houston or a city manager and they're asking you what's different about you and what are you going to bring, that's different and you can start describing the qualities in that book and how you treat customers, you can just see their eyes light up and not that the fire departments were doing a terrible job.
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: But to have a fire chief saying these are one of the values that I have that I'm going to try to instill down through the organization, yeah, it works really well when you start talking about the customer and their terms and he said that very well in the book is that we see the customer, we see our job in our professional terms and the customer sees our job in their emotional terms and we've got to match those up.
• 23:06
  Speaker 3: That's the key to that, you know.
• 23:08
  Speaker 3: I just think of that deal where you said about being a good firefighter yeah, man, you kicked that door.
• 23:13
  Speaker 3: Good job, you kicked it in, but next time try the knob.
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: I mean, you know things like that, do you just?
• 23:19
  Speaker 4: well, and that's part of the core service.
• 23:21
  Speaker 4: It's like, no, don't care, try before you pry.
• 23:23
  Speaker 4: I mean just good standard practices.
• 23:25
  Speaker 4: So getting there and the people I don't know.
• 23:29
  Speaker 4: This was kind of odd, but the people who didn't want to do good customer service tended not to be very good firefighters.
• 23:38
  Speaker 4: No, I'm going to kick the door in.
• 23:40
  Speaker 4: This is all about what my view of what this job looks like, what I should be doing.
• 23:46
  Speaker 4: This is how I have my ego wrapped up into this and validate myself as a hero, which can be very distracting.
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: And I think those people weren't much fun to be around at work either.
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: No, I mean they're angry at the world for whatever reason.
• 24:00
  Speaker 4: Well, when they go home they tell their family call me Captain.
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: Oh, okay, captain Dad and that's one of the eight principles here in the book is don't disqualify others with your qualifications, yeah Right, and that's one of the eight principles here in the book is don't disqualify others with your qualifications, yeah Right, and that's really to that end, right.
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: Well, and then part of that qualifying the customer is, he would say, and we've said over the years is a customer doesn't have to smell.
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: Perfect, they can smell like urine, they can smell like vomit, they can be laying on a park bench.
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: I know that's all difficult, 2.30 in the morning, but your customer shouldn't have to qualify for your service.
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: Okay, buddy, you're a little too angry, you're a little too drunk, you're a little too stupid.
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: We're going to leave the scene and not provide any service for you.
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: So that's part of that.
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: Your customer shouldn't have to qualify to be delivered this service.
• 24:49
  Speaker 4: Well, some people disqualify themselves as customers.
• 24:51
  Speaker 4: You know, you get there and they're violent.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: They're doing a certain set of things.
• 24:55
  Speaker 4: Well, yeah, I mean there's certain people that are going to disqualify and well, you're not a fire department customer, you're a law enforcement customer.
• 25:02
  Speaker 4: So I mean that piece of it is.
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: But we shouldn't qualify the customer every time we arrive on the scene.
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: You tell the story very well about the wiping the cancer patient.
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: Now there was a time in our career that probably nobody would have done that.
• 25:18
  Speaker 4: No, that wasn't our job.
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: No, we're not doing that.
• 25:21
  Speaker 4: But because we had a fire chief that said, well, no, you can add value to people's and that didn't cost anything.
• 25:26
  Speaker 4: What we did, I mean it was just part of the service delivery cycle.
• 25:30
  Speaker 4: At that point, glove up and get it done.
• 25:32
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what the thing was, you know.
• 25:35
  Speaker 4: The other part of that is people say, well, you don't meet my expectation of the service.
• 25:40
  Speaker 4: I should be delivering.
• 25:41
  Speaker 4: And you think, okay, well, let's just you get to do that all the time.
• 25:46
  Speaker 4: Now, jimmy is, from now on, every shift you're going to go on working fires and people that are in the process of dying.
• 25:55
  Speaker 4: Every single call is going to be that how long are you going to last?
• 25:59
  Speaker 4: Oh, I'd love it.
• 26:01
  Speaker 4: No, man, you're going to be burned out.
• 26:04
  Speaker 4: Nothing in five, 10 years, 20 dead a day.
• 26:08
  Speaker 4: That's not what that looks like, pal.
• 26:10
  Speaker 4: So you don't want to go to your training level.
• 26:15
  Speaker 4: Every single incident, I mean, if every incident you go to you have to have a major rehab before they put you back in service, you're going to wear out very quickly.
• 26:25
  Speaker 4: You're a gladiator?
• 26:26
  Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
• 26:27
  Speaker 4: Well, you know, the best gladiators all got shit chopped off sooner than later.
• 26:32
  Speaker 4: You think, no, man, don't disqualify, as you're going on the calls, if you're not going to do anything, just don't make it worse.
• 26:42
  Speaker 4: Don't be mean to them or anything else.
• 26:44
  Speaker 4: Tell them whatever, have a nice interaction with them and disconnect.
• 26:49
  Speaker 4: I mean that's it.
• 26:50
  Speaker 3: And that's what happened, too, is with our organization.
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: There were some people that were slow learners with the customer service piece, so they would just take two steps back and let the people that really understood it just step forward.
• 27:02
  Speaker 3: I had a partner that a wonderful guy off the job, a lot of fun and got me in a lot of trouble.
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: But at 2 o'clock in the morning you don't want this guy as your paramedic partner.
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: It's like dude, I don't want to go in that house and fist fight everybody in that house because you're being an asshole.
• 27:20
  Speaker 3: Stay on the truck.
• 27:21
  Speaker 3: We'll be back out in about 15 minutes.
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: Don't even go inside.
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: Well, you saw that happen quite a bit.
• 27:36
  Speaker 4: Hey, man, and if you're the captain of that truck, at some point you're going to have a talk with that guy and say, hey, we ain't doing your customer service routine anymore pal, you see.
• 27:40
  Speaker 4: So that's like first level.
• 27:41
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so once you went over that group of first level supervisors in the customer service field, it almost becomes unauthorized not to deliver some level of higher quality service.
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: Well, Bruno's explaining to us that, hey, these people are having the worst day of their lives.
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: That's why they called you.
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: So don't expect them to pull up a chaise lounge and wave a flag and be happy that you're there.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: They're already having a bad day.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: Don't compound it by being a jerk and not treating them nice.
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: I mean, I've heard him say that so much, but we've got to remind our people that a lot of times.
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: You've got to remind them, somebody's got to remind them.
• 28:18
  Speaker 4: You do and you have to come up with routines, because we go on calls all the time where it's like we get there and there's nothing for us to do.
• 28:26
  Speaker 4: I mean they called us for whatever reason.
• 28:28
  Speaker 4: You think, well, there's nothing.
• 28:30
  Speaker 4: I worked at a station and the engine went on a call once.
• 28:33
  Speaker 4: It was during the holidays, and they got there and the family said we don't have a tree, we'd like you to get us a tree.
• 28:39
  Speaker 4: And I mean so this was a very independent, strong-minded group of engine people.
• 28:46
  Speaker 4: I said what did you do?
• 28:47
  Speaker 4: He says well, we left, left and we got him a tree.
• 28:51
  Speaker 4: And we came back and the parents were indulging in intoxications to a level where they could have bought six trees.
• 28:56
  Speaker 4: And I said what'd you do?
• 28:58
  Speaker 4: He says we dropped the tree off and left.
• 28:59
  Speaker 4: That's what we did, yeah, and so it's like they were stressed, they had a little PTSD from that episode.
• 29:06
  Speaker 4: He said okay, what are you going to do tomorrow when you get off work?
• 29:13
  Speaker 4: Well, I'm going to go have breakfast with my friends and do X, y and Z and I'm not going to call 911 for my basic needs.
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: There's probably a really good customer service kind of way to say we're not going to get you a tree, what else do you need?
• 29:24
  Speaker 4: Do you?
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: need groceries.
• 29:26
  Speaker 4: You could trace that back and say why is the dispatch center sending you on, get a tree?
• 29:31
  Speaker 4: And what it was is they had some difficulty breathing front and then it was, oh no, she's gone, we need a tree.
• 29:38
  Speaker 4: But it was one of those stories that they told for a really, really long time.
• 29:44
  Speaker 4: It almost became an excuse for them.
• 29:47
  Speaker 4: You think how long did it take?
• 29:49
  Speaker 4: It was about 15, 20 minutes total.
• 29:51
  Speaker 4: Did you buy a tree?
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: No, we went to a Christmas tree lot and we told the owner that the poor people needed a tree and they gave it to us.
• 30:00
  Speaker 3: You know, the biggest thing you would hear when that was happening sorry, I'm shaking the table is that I didn't sign on to be a babysitter.
• 30:06
  Speaker 3: I didn't sign on for this.
• 30:07
  Speaker 3: Well, yeah, you did.
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: You signed on to.
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: Like you said, it's a service delivery system and the fire chief says we're going to start taking care of the customer.
• 30:16
  Speaker 3: You work for the fire chief.
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: Take care of the customer Seems pretty simple and obvious, but some guys had a real hard time with it.
• 30:24
  Speaker 3: And then those people had a hard time.
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: Like I said, in the station.
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: Some of them are supervisors.
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: I remember a supervisor.
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: We had a patient that had a head injury and the the from the cab of the truck.
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: The fire captain assumed it was a intoxication of that patient, that he had a sister with him.
• 30:42
  Speaker 3: It's two o'clock in the morning, it's raining and the captain says, hey, he's just a drunk, let's not worry about him.
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: And it's like, no, we're going to take care of this guy.
• 30:49
  Speaker 3: If you want to sit in a truck, have him sit in the truck.
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: We're going to take care of this guy.
• 30:53
  Speaker 3: We get him down and, sure enough.
• 30:59
  Speaker 3: He had a head injury that looked like intoxication.
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: But that guy probably went through.
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: We talked about him a few times here.
• 31:03
  Speaker 3: Probably went through his entire career and never got the customer service piece of it right.
• 31:08
  Speaker 4: Mm-hmm yeah customer service.
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: Piece of it, right, mm-hmm, yeah, so some people it's I don't know.
• 31:13
  Speaker 4: Well, you know, and people acted like well you know.
• 31:14
  Speaker 4: You have to go over all this trouble.
• 31:16
  Speaker 4: No, you don't.
• 31:17
  Speaker 4: I figured out.
• 31:20
  Speaker 4: You're going to go on the call one way or another.
• 31:21
  Speaker 4: You're going to spend 10 minutes on this call.
• 31:23
  Speaker 4: You can be an asshole or you can be a decent human being.
• 31:26
  Speaker 4: It's the same 10 minutes.
• 31:36
  Speaker 4: You're not going to deliver any more services when you're nice.
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: You're just explaining you're patient, you're I don't know.
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: You make the kid a balloon animal out of a rubber glove whatever it is you do, you smile at them.
• 31:41
  Speaker 4: Yeah, you don't threaten them and tell them that they're wasting your time and everything else.
• 31:44
  Speaker 4: It's like, okay, you know, maybe try this next time, drink more water, get plenty of sleep.
• 31:49
  Speaker 4: You know, just suggestions.
• 31:50
  Speaker 4: We make good suggestions most of the time, but the other was like oh no, I'm going to come.
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: Anyone who said I'm going to educate the customer you thought, oh God, that's like telling your wife to calm down that never works.
• 32:05
  Speaker 4: No, it doesn't Calm down.
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: I think a lot of firefighters get the treating the customer nice, the people that called 911.
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: It's that other part of regarding everyone as a customer.
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: I think Bruno identified that there's a whole group of people that's watching from the scene.
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: So you have the patient.
• 32:27
  Speaker 3: Who's the actual patient.
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: You have the significant others is what we call them so their families standing around watching it.
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: They got their kind of view of what's happening.
• 32:37
  Speaker 3: Make the kids what did you say?
• 32:40
  Speaker 3: A balloon animal.
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: You got what we used to say and it's probably not the proper term now, but the insignificant others were the passerbys people in cars driving by looking to see how you're treating that person, whether on a park bench or whatever.
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: And then the other agencies that we would deal with back then PD or the electric company, or the nurses at the hospital or whatever.
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: Those are all different groups of customers that are kind of watching you and it just takes a second to kind of treat them all with respect, engage them a little bit.
• 33:14
  Speaker 3: The worst thing we do is when we just blow somebody off.
• 33:17
  Speaker 3: Somebody wants to know something.
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: I don't have time to give you any information, I'm too important and there are some times when you just got to treat the customer and not worry about them, but you ought to get back to them somehow or have somebody get back to them.
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: Everybody's a customer, right.
• 33:34
  Speaker 3: And then I don't know, man, I've been in fire departments where the firefighters are real close and they're real tight, and the fire prevention folks, they're a whole different.
• 33:44
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, those are just fire prevention folks.
• 33:46
  Speaker 3: Well, let's be nice to them too.
• 33:48
  Speaker 3: Like I think that's what you're getting at, that's the administrative stuff.
• 33:51
  Speaker 3: Let's treat them kind too.
• 33:54
  Speaker 3: So you start that.
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: I think you start that being kind to everybody works out really well for you and it doesn't cost a damn thing.
• 34:02
  Speaker 3: Right, nick, you're a fun guy.
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: I've seen you crazy for about 40 years now.
• 34:09
  Speaker 3: I've never seen you be mean to anybody.
• 34:12
  Speaker 4: Well, you don't have to be.
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: Unless it was on purpose and they deserved it.
• 34:16
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that was mostly inside.
• 34:17
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that was jihad, and with the other chefs.
• 34:20
  Speaker 4: But, yeah you know, no, you didn't have to.
• 34:23
  Speaker 4: It was, you didn't have to be mean to people, you could have a good time and all the rest of it.
• 34:28
  Speaker 4: And then it just it became helpful for everybody.
• 34:31
  Speaker 4: One of that was the organizational edict is no, we're going to be nice and Van said it earlier, it's like we're not only going to be nice to the people outside, we're going to be nice to the people inside.
• 34:42
  Speaker 4: See, and that became the charges of all the bosses on in our organization and so organization and say there was a uh, a freedom and a joy that came working for an organization where you knew the rules and what, and there was and they routinely said these five rules, if you break them you could be fired for that, and it was obvious to everybody.
• 35:05
  Speaker 4: And when we knew what they were and if you do your job correctly and everything else, you're going to be okay.
• 35:11
  Speaker 4: Well, you could watch that and say I knew what I could get away with and what I couldn't, I guess, to put it in those terms.
• 35:19
  Speaker 4: But I also knew what the boss, how much power they actually had over me and what they could do, and I thought, okay, if I am competent in my core services and I behave myself on calls.
• 35:34
  Speaker 4: There's not a whole lot you can do.
• 35:36
  Speaker 4: I can have all kinds of lunchtime observations because I have First Amendment rights.
• 35:41
  Speaker 3: Bruno used to say I want my firefighters sober and celibate for 24 hours.
• 35:47
  Speaker 4: Yeah, those were like four of the five rules that we couldn't break.
• 35:51
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 35:51
  Speaker 3: But we had it.
• 35:52
  Speaker 3: We came out and the other was what?
• 35:53
  Speaker 4: the five rules that we couldn't break, yeah.
• 35:55
  Speaker 4: And the other was what To steal you couldn't steal, you shouldn't steal, yeah.
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: So, especially from like like, from the city and from the people who you work with, you can't go through the lockers because yeah, that was um, we, we came out with a uh safety book at one time and it had this really great two statements in it.
• 36:11
  Speaker 3: That would make sense for customer service too, and it was that, and I hope I say it right.
• 36:16
  Speaker 3: But supervisors are not authorized to overlook safety issues and command officers are not authorized to not follow up on those violations, on those violations.
• 36:28
  Speaker 3: So then you knew, if you violated something, a safety rule and I think it was the same way with customer service and you get held accountable for that, or your boss calls you on that, don't be surprised by that.
• 36:39
  Speaker 3: So it got to the point with customer service.
• 36:41
  Speaker 3: If you treat somebody like an asshole, you know that.
• 36:44
  Speaker 3: In fact, if you're on a scene, say, you'd rove around and you go to a call and you see somebody else acting like an asshole, you'd think, ok, let's see how this goes, let's watch this captain, and the captain would hold him accountable in most cases.
• 36:59
  Speaker 3: Not everybody's perfect, not every system is perfect, but you say, ok, let's watch this.
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: And there was sure enough, right there there was a lot of a built trust in an organization.
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: Right, you trust the bosses are going to hold people accountable, because there's nothing worse to say, oh, I do all the right things, but that guy lets that guy get away with everything.
• 37:21
  Speaker 4: No, I think it was pretty much accountability across them.
• 37:22
  Speaker 4: I worked with a pair of engineers early in my career.
• 37:25
  Speaker 4: We had had a few shifts in a row where it was more and more difficult to be nice, you know, just as you got on the truck.
• 37:34
  Speaker 4: And so it was like the sun was coming up and I was about done and one of the engineers took me off the site and says hey, man, we got this.
• 37:43
  Speaker 4: He says the last guy we had here was an asshole and thank you for not being that way.
• 37:53
  Speaker 4: The last supervisor, yeah, the last person who worked on this truck.
• 37:56
  Speaker 4: And he says we're going to take care of Jimmy right now.
• 38:00
  Speaker 4: You just sit here.
• 38:01
  Speaker 4: It's just done.
• 38:03
  Speaker 4: Season, okay, and that was it.
• 38:07
  Speaker 4: We got back to the station.
• 38:08
  Speaker 4: He says hey, that was no.
• 38:08
  Speaker 4: He says you may have to pull me off once every year or two, but it was.
• 38:15
  Speaker 4: We take care of one another this way.
• 38:17
  Speaker 4: We just kind of they called it tapping out and it was.
• 38:20
  Speaker 4: That was the deal.
• 38:21
  Speaker 4: And so you had a young person who was just starting, who couldn't be me, because I mean, they were just trying to figure out what they were supposed to be all the time anyway, they were just trying to figure out what they were supposed to be all the time anyway.
• 38:29
  Speaker 4: And then two older engineers who had years on me that were, they knew what was important in the thing and and they were extremely competent in just the basic core mission that we did.
• 38:43
  Speaker 4: But they were just a couple of chill guys that would make balloon animals and, yeah, seem to do very well in human relations with other people across all spectrums.
• 38:56
  Speaker 4: I noticed that with the Be Nice, the people that were the nicest had the most uh, pretty pretty boys and girls that they called friends I recognize that yeah life's been good to me so far
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: those are two different songs and I only belong to one of them, yeah well, let's talk about one more before we go, and that is considering how what you are doing looks to others, because I know, as a fire chief, this is when I would get the phone calls.
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you'd get the phone calls.
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you ever got those phone calls, but it's the crews out of quarters and they're doing something.
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: They're not delivering service, they're playing tennis, they're visiting the ice cream shop and your dad even brought it up during the recession.
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: It's not in the book, but hey, you know it's a recession right now.
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: Maybe standing around getting $10 lattes isn't really the right message you're sending to the community, especially if a lot of people were laid off recently.
• 39:59
  Speaker 4: Yeah, don't wash your Corvette in front of the station.
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this is probably not a good idea.
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so how about that one?
• 40:08
  Speaker 2: Do you guys have any examples of?
• 40:08
  Speaker 2: You know, for folks who are listening or watching, because I know firefighters always had trouble with this one because there's one guy on the National Circuit that would say you know, let the boys be boys and let them sit out in front of the fire station and shoot the breeze if they want.
• 40:23
  Speaker 2: Well, that would generate, during a period of time, a lot of complaints.
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: Just guys sitting in front of the fire station for whatever reason.
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: As a matter of fact, there was a guy that I knew that was on a pretty exclusively paid-on-call department and somebody swung up into the front of the apron because they were done training or done with their call or whatever, and just shooting a breeze before they go home.
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: They weren't even staffing the station and the customer yells at him like this is what I'm paying for.
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: Well, this guy was very smart and had emotional EQ and explained to him hey, we're paid on-call firefighters, we're just wrapping it up and we're going home to eat dinner now.
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: So do you guys have any examples like that?
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: That would be helpful for folks.
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: So I had one that kind of went maybe a little bit the other way.
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: So when I was a fire chief in Oceanside and this was 2008, we had a fire company that was right down on the beach and what this fire company did for their PT is they would park the fire company right there, the fire engine right there, where all the people were, and they would take off for a run and they would run a quarter mile and they'd come back run a quarter mile.
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: They had their radio on and I had a discussion with one of the city council members who was irate about that and I supported the fire company.
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: I said you know, they're on the beach, that's where the customers are.
• 41:42
  Speaker 3: They're dressed properly for what they're doing.
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: They're running up and down the beach.
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: They're not getting too far away.
• 41:48
  Speaker 3: I'm trying to bring all the positive things.
• 41:49
  Speaker 3: It's a positive image Firefighter's in shape, doing what they need to do.
• 41:54
  Speaker 3: They can respond from there.
• 41:58
  Speaker 3: And he never did get that.
• 41:59
  Speaker 3: So I don't know how that would play out nowadays.
• 42:05
  Speaker 3: I don't know if that would be as uh, as easy for them to do nowadays.
• 42:07
  Speaker 3: You know, I don't know, nick, what do you think?
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: That just seems like.
• 42:10
  Speaker 3: For me that was.
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: It was like no, that's why I want them.
• 42:13
  Speaker 3: They're out there doing exactly what they need to do.
• 42:16
  Speaker 3: And this guy got fired up in me um, but that's, but you can't do that.
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: And then do the other stuff.
• 42:23
  Speaker 3: That's really out of whack, because then they tie that.
• 42:26
  Speaker 3: See, I told you these guys, they're washing their Corvette out in front of this fire station.
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: Those are the same guys running on the beach.
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: So you got to kind of take one and pull it over here and say this seems okay.
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: And pull these over here and say these are not okay.
• 42:40
  Speaker 3: And you got to give examples.
• 42:41
  Speaker 3: As a fire chief, you've got to give examples.
• 42:44
  Speaker 2: I use that one a lot too.
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: How what we're doing looks to others is the excessive celebration after a fire, and I don't know, if Bruno came up with that one, but I think I heard.
• 42:54
  Speaker 2: I don't think it's in the book, but I think he did it in a class once and it's yeah, we're chest bumping, high five and smiles because you know, we just got some.
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: we just tamed the beast, spiked the family dog, mrs mrs smith is sitting there like man.
• 43:10
  Speaker 3: I just lost my house.
• 43:11
  Speaker 3: What are these guys doing?
• 43:11
  Speaker 3: Pictures in front of fire station, in front of fires yeah, active fires, or just after the fires.
• 43:14
  Speaker 3: That was one of the psych hey guys, don't do that, go back to the station type.
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: But don't do that because somebody's watching that.
• 43:22
  Speaker 3: Now we just had an incident in our city here about ring cameras.
• 43:26
  Speaker 3: Talk about how you look to everybody else, so you're never off a video.
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: Right now they're out front, they're talking to a customer and the ring camera is recording absolutely everything and now they're held accountable for what was happening on that ring car.
• 43:42
  Speaker 3: Or we had one where they come up to the door as they're knocking and they're waiting for the customer to come to the door.
• 43:50
  Speaker 3: The ring camera is recording what they're saying before they go in and they're held accountable for that.
• 43:57
  Speaker 3: It's like, oh my, because the family goes back and they see the ring cam.
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: Hey, see what these firefighters said about us.
• 44:04
  Speaker 3: That's not good.
• 44:05
  Speaker 4: Well, and now you've got a video of it.
• 44:08
  Speaker 3: I mean that's yeah, it's going to go somewhere.
• 44:10
  Speaker 4: Well, and then usually what happens?
• 44:12
  Speaker 4: What can happen is there's an inquiry, a complaint made, and they say oh, we never did that, and they don't tell them oh no, you're on video doing it, we have this, and so now they're playing games.
• 44:23
  Speaker 4: Is there a process in it?
• 44:27
  Speaker 3: Judge Judy says oh, I see, I got a monitor here.
• 44:29
  Speaker 3: There's going to be a video you don't find that out until you go to court.
• 44:34
  Speaker 4: Well, see, and that should be something that you got to be familiar with that if you're working on a company, everybody's got you're being recorded all the time.
• 44:42
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that sucks about society today.
• 44:46
  Speaker 4: It's the way the police solve all the crimes today.
• 44:50
  Speaker 3: Your cell phone and cameras just videotaping everything that happens in the world and you know, I don't want people to be paranoid, but every time a fire engine drives down the road whether Code 3, lights and sirens are just going down the road, people are watching that fire engine.
• 45:07
  Speaker 3: You know, and we used to have, and I remember back in the day, I haven't seen it for a very long time If somebody gets in front of you and they're going too slow and you're trying to get to a call, what did we do?
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: Lay on that horn man.
• 45:19
  Speaker 3: And get right on their ass and just push them toward and it's like, don't do that.
• 45:25
  Speaker 4: Yeah, the really nice engineers I had, that was one of their bad habits.
• 45:28
  Speaker 4: Come on, buddy, it's not nice to scare the customers when you're driving to the call.
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: So we would have a procedure for that.
• 45:37
  Speaker 4: And they said well, you know, they're always watching you on a fire truck and you think no shit.
• 45:41
  Speaker 4: Well, you know, they're always watching you on a fire truck and you think no shit.
• 45:42
  Speaker 4: We painted the thing red.
• 45:43
  Speaker 4: It's three times as big and we put flashing lights and sirens on it so you couldn't miss it.
• 45:48
  Speaker 4: Yeah, oh, they're noticing us Uh-huh.
• 45:50
  Speaker 4: Uh-huh, we're Asian, 700,000 lumens coming at you yeah, yeah.
• 45:55
  Speaker 3: And children love them.
• 45:56
  Speaker 4: Yeah, Uh-huh, I used to write on the tailboard back in the day and you'd pull up and certain people would show their gratitude by showing you things.
• 46:04
  Speaker 3: Their gratitude.
• 46:05
  Speaker 4: Yeah, their gratitudes, I never got that.
• 46:08
  Speaker 2: Attitude of gratitude.
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so this book it's out and it's the customer service book from Alan Bernasini.
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: We just scratched the surface of it, oh no, not even close.
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's so much in there and I think it's such a great help for anybody that's in a leadership position, whether you're leading a small group, a large group, if you're the fire chief.
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: So many tools in that book to help you out, because I would use each of those eight principles all the time to help us guide our customer service efforts.
• 46:41
  Speaker 3: Oh, and he says it so much better than we have here in that book.
• 46:45
  Speaker 4: Yes, Well, it just makes sense.
• 46:46
  Speaker 4: I mean, you read the book and you think, well, why wouldn't you?
• 46:49
  Speaker 4: Yeah, why wouldn't I do this?
• 46:51
  Speaker 3: It's just that it's yeah, but like you said, you could get that book and that could be a company project.
• 46:56
  Speaker 3: Hey, let's go through the book together.
• 46:58
  Speaker 3: It could be an organizational project.
• 47:00
  Speaker 3: Let's go through this book together and make sure we're kind of understanding all these concepts and working through them.
• 47:06
  Speaker 4: Well, not only that, but the other part of it you guys brought it up a couple times is it's inside-outside.
• 47:12
  Speaker 4: So, like the strategic people in the organization reading that thinking, if I want to empower my people to do value-added customer service, then I have to treat them accordingly and support them in such a way that they will go out and do that.
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: Bruno was talking to a well-known fire chief that I saw and the light bulb finally came up on for this individual when he said something to the extent of, like, if you're going to do it for any reason, do it, so your organization gets stuff.
• 47:42
  Speaker 2: Like, if you can't do it because you're just going to be a good human but you want to look out for your organization, maybe that's the reason to do it.
• 47:49
  Speaker 3: I mean, there's there's several reasons that motivate us, but um, you're right, Nick, that that applies, and I think that book um focuses mostly on the external customer, but just every one of those seven, eight concepts apply to the internal customer.
• 48:05
  Speaker 3: Just put Firefighter Smith instead of Mrs Smith and it works out perfect.
• 48:11
  Speaker 4: And Terry mentioned the Silverback Leadership Program we're working on, which was all the leadership stuff he kind of had assembled during his life and pretty much that book is the centerpiece of all of that assembled during his life and pretty much that book is the centerpiece of all of that.
• 48:26
  Speaker 4: You got boss behaviors, no-brainer management, a&p, that and a couple other things, but customer service is 80% of that program and I mean that's the timelessness of that book.
• 48:33
  Speaker 4: That's why we didn't touch a word in it and thought, no, here it is the way it is.
• 48:37
  Speaker 4: And in fact the leadership thing we're putting together we're kind of mapping out what the first module is going to look like with the work and we're putting the media together now and that's kind of the.
• 48:48
  Speaker 4: It identifies core and added value and our relationship within the community and how to kind of maximize that for the most efficient and effective operations we can do and kind of it's exciting, there's going to be a lot of juice to it and we'll do it off of scenarios, like we did with Blue Card.
• 49:12
  Speaker 4: So there will be like simulations almost.
• 49:15
  Speaker 4: They did X, y and Z and that book is full of those.
• 49:19
  Speaker 4: So we'll just kind of expand on that and we see probably the next I don't know eight weeks, I think.
• 49:26
  Speaker 4: Hopefully we'll have something that we can start putting up and people can look in and see that.
• 49:31
  Speaker 4: But in the meantime, like you said, vance, we got the books now and they're back.
• 49:35
  Speaker 4: They were never out of print but they were very hard to get because Oklahoma really wasn't IFSTA wasn't doing much with them.
• 49:41
  Speaker 4: So now we have them over, we're going to put it out.
• 49:43
  Speaker 4: If you want to get these books, you don't have to go to eBay and spend 180 bucks anymore, is we're selling them for 50 bucks out of all day long.
• 49:54
  Speaker 2: $25 less than the last round I bought and I had to buy one for each station.
• 49:58
  Speaker 2: So yeah, it's going to save some money.
• 50:04
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so, but it's and it's.
• 50:04
  Speaker 4: It's going to save some money.
• 50:04
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's going to be in print all the time and it's the same basic core book.
• 50:06
  Speaker 4: Nobody was.
• 50:06
  Speaker 4: Yeah, You're getting what the grand pooh-bob put out originally, which is, I think, of a very high value I'd use it for a promotional exam.
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's just wonderful yeah.
• 50:20
  Speaker 3: Right on Right arm, right arm, right arm.
• 50:22
  Speaker 3: Wonderful, yeah, yeah, right on right arm, right arm, right arm you know what?
• 50:24
  Speaker 2: it's time for time to stack here yes, it is all right.
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: Timeless tactical to truth from alan brunasini and this week's is losing your temper generally represents the incipient stage of rectal cranial inversion.
• 50:49
  Speaker 2: That's a nice way of saying that.
• 50:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, let's talk about losing your temper at work.
• 50:58
  Speaker 3: I don't want to talk about it.
• 51:01
  Speaker 2: That and communication Right.
• 51:04
  Speaker 3: No losing your temper.
• 51:05
  Speaker 3: You know, we had a guy I was a fire captain on a roving company.
• 51:10
  Speaker 3: It was one of our adaptive response units and we would travel around throughout the city and fill in where other guys were training and we would get a schedule.
• 51:18
  Speaker 3: In the morning We'd call the shift commander.
• 51:20
  Speaker 3: He'd say in the morning you're going to this side of town, in the afternoon you're going to this side of town.
• 51:24
  Speaker 3: So we would take with us our racquetball equipment, our basketball equipment, all our turnouts obviously, and one extra set of clothing and a lunch.
• 51:33
  Speaker 4: You were like a caravan.
• 51:34
  Speaker 3: We were a caravan.
• 51:35
  Speaker 3: So I'd get there and I'd been there for a few shifts and I finally had a captain call me and he goes hey, you guys are coming over, because they're smart, they go.
• 51:44
  Speaker 3: You guys are coming over to our side of town.
• 51:46
  Speaker 3: This morning I said, yeah.
• 51:48
  Speaker 3: He said, well, you can't play basketball with us.
• 51:51
  Speaker 3: So what do you mean?
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: So you can't play basketball, we're not allowing you guys to play basketball.
• 51:55
  Speaker 3: I said what are you talking about, man?
• 51:57
  Speaker 3: You're, we're buddies.
• 51:57
  Speaker 3: What do you mean?
• 51:58
  Speaker 3: He goes you got a guy in, you got two guys on that engine company.
• 52:02
  Speaker 3: Every time you come over, the one guy fights with everybody.
• 52:05
  Speaker 3: He fights with his own guy, fights with everybody on the team and he goes.
• 52:09
  Speaker 3: We don't want you to play basketball.
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: So I know this won't happen this time.
• 52:13
  Speaker 3: So sure enough, we go and I promise it doesn't happen.
• 52:16
  Speaker 3: I talk to our guys hey, don't get in a fight, don, don't get in a fight, don't do this.
• 52:19
  Speaker 3: We go there and, sure enough, the big guy starts arguing with everybody and getting all pissed off and I finally have to call him to the side and they're like looking at us, like told you.
• 52:27
  Speaker 3: I said, dude, what the hell's wrong with you.
• 52:29
  Speaker 3: He goes hey, I lose my temper, man, I go.
• 52:31
  Speaker 3: What do you mean?
• 52:32
  Speaker 3: You lose your temper.
• 52:33
  Speaker 3: He goes.
• 52:33
  Speaker 3: Everybody knows I lose my temper.
• 52:35
  Speaker 3: That's just my personality knows I lose my temper.
• 52:44
  Speaker 3: So, dude, you need to find your temper.
• 52:45
  Speaker 3: And we didn't get to play basketball for several shifts until he promised me he wouldn't lose his temper.
• 52:48
  Speaker 3: But everybody's like, oh, that's just the asshole of the group, he always loses his temper, you know.
• 52:53
  Speaker 3: You may know who I'm talking about.
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: He's about six foot seven.
• 52:56
  Speaker 3: It's like no, dude, you can't lose your temper.
• 52:59
  Speaker 3: And it's just was so ironic that everybody knew that this guy was the guy that was going to lose his temper.
• 53:07
  Speaker 4: So there were certain guys that would play basketball and they would take care of Mr Temper.
• 53:12
  Speaker 4: Right, oh yeah, he would go sit down and not play anymore, right, yeah, you think?
• 53:18
  Speaker 4: Okay, we took care of him.
• 53:20
  Speaker 3: Heal your cracked ribs over there.
• 53:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, oh, okay, we took care of yeah, to heal your cracked ribs over there.
• 53:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, oh, uh-huh, yeah.
• 53:24
  Speaker 3: So anyway, there are people that think it's just fine.
• 53:28
  Speaker 3: Losing your temper is kind of a common thing.
• 53:30
  Speaker 3: Oh, I know people lose their temper.
• 53:32
  Speaker 3: No, it's not common, it shouldn't be right.
• 53:35
  Speaker 3: And when you do it right there, right, oh.
• 53:38
  Speaker 3: Rectal cranial inversion.
• 53:48
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's probably you can't.
• 53:48
  Speaker 4: I don't know, it's not 1985 anymore.
• 53:50
  Speaker 4: You really can't be rolling around and threatening.
• 53:51
  Speaker 4: Okay, you're going to lose your temper.
• 53:53
  Speaker 4: We're going to introduce you to a smart Z.
• 53:55
  Speaker 4: It just doesn't work.
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: It feels good to say.
• 53:59
  Speaker 4: Well, it would feel good to watch.
• 54:00
  Speaker 4: Sometimes too, you think, okay, this guy has been, he's been building up to this for years and it's finally going to happen.
• 54:07
  Speaker 4: But you know, when I was at BC, I got called to a couple incidents where they lost their tempers at work and three or four weeks later they went home for a couple shifts to think about it.
• 54:21
  Speaker 4: I think that was one of the seven.
• 54:23
  Speaker 3: You said you can't fight on duty.
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: You know you talk on the front end.
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: We talk about customer service, chief Brunicini, we talk about inside, outside customer service.
• 54:32
  Speaker 3: He didn't care, and I've seen this.
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: I tell people this, they go.
• 54:36
  Speaker 3: No, he didn't.
• 54:36
  Speaker 3: Large fire department, fire chief in the corner.
• 54:39
  Speaker 3: You could walk up there and walk into his office and say, hey, bruno, you got a minute.
• 54:44
  Speaker 3: Or say, hey, chief, you got a minute.
• 54:46
  Speaker 3: He'd get up from his desk, come around, sit down, talk to you Customer service.
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: I mean, he did it right there and he knew who the knuckleheads were in the organization.
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: He knew those guys but he always took care of everybody.
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: But he wouldn't tolerate everything.
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: You know, kindness, don't confuse kindness with weakness.
• 55:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah, no don't be the guy that loses your temper a lot because brunicini will, yeah, yeah, you ever see anybody lose a timber in a captain's meeting?
• 55:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah, he he he, he will correct you pretty quick, he doesn't allow it.
• 55:25
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it was even more fun.
• 55:26
  Speaker 4: Whatever you were doing involved shovels and manual labor, and somebody started getting shitty.
• 55:32
  Speaker 4: It was like oh.
• 55:33
  Speaker 4: I mean you tell stories about your dad where, okay, he picked you up with one hand Mm-hmm, that's what they tended to do.
• 55:40
  Speaker 4: Yeah, those people were not afraid of anything.
• 55:45
  Speaker 4: They just, I mean they're fearless.
• 55:48
  Speaker 4: I mean it wasn't like going into burning buildings or anything.
• 55:51
  Speaker 4: I mean it was fearless of like confrontations with other individuals.
• 55:56
  Speaker 4: I mean just, you know, the toughest guys on the job would cower over.
• 55:59
  Speaker 4: You know, I don't know how to.
• 56:01
  Speaker 4: I mean it was and it was scary.
• 56:04
  Speaker 4: Sometimes They'd just cut through and, oh my, uh-oh, we're in a new place Because, you know, I grew up with them.
• 56:11
  Speaker 4: I knew kind of what his tells were sometimes and you could see where he was going.
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: You're thinking, no, this guy's going to say this next and it's not going to be pretty when you see him just look back and put that finger like this oh no, no, no, because then he would put it over there.
• 56:32
  Speaker 4: Once that went his mouth, he thought if you're not ready to defend yourself, you need to not be in the room.
• 56:34
  Speaker 4: This is, this is going to turn into something you're not used to, and older people would tell you stories about that from like the late 50s and early 60s and Henry Jessen at George's Olay Bar, all the big tough guys and your old man.
• 56:53
  Speaker 4: They thought they were going to do that One day.
• 56:56
  Speaker 4: He just stood up and he beat him with a chair.
• 56:59
  Speaker 4: What he took?
• 57:00
  Speaker 4: An overstuffed chair.
• 57:01
  Speaker 4: The captain loved and he beat the crew with chair.
• 57:02
  Speaker 4: What he took an overstuffed chair, the captain loved, and he beat the crew with it.
• 57:05
  Speaker 4: Really, yeah, that's when I learned to love him.
• 57:09
  Speaker 4: You said, jesus Christ.
• 57:12
  Speaker 3: So Verno did say in one captain's meeting it's a beautiful one.
• 57:15
  Speaker 3: I don't know if we've ever said it on here before, a chief couldn't get away with it nowadays.
• 57:19
  Speaker 3: But they were having a captain's meeting and we had a very well, how would you describe him?
• 57:26
  Speaker 3: The fire captain.
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: He was an asshole and he was always grumpy and he disagreed with pretty much everything.
• 57:32
  Speaker 3: He was entertaining as hell, but he was crazier than shit.
• 57:34
  Speaker 3: And he challenged Bruno on something openly.
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: And Bruno said to him in the captain's meeting I wasn't there, but it really made the organization around the organization fast.
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: He said you know what you and I have and he goes.
• 57:50
  Speaker 3: And this guy was a fire captain.
• 57:51
  Speaker 3: He said you know what you and I have in common in this organization.
• 57:54
  Speaker 3: He said what's that chief?
• 57:55
  Speaker 3: He goes.
• 57:56
  Speaker 3: We've both gone as far and as high as we're going to go.
• 57:59
  Speaker 3: That's great, couldn't?
• 58:01
  Speaker 2: do that now, yeah yeah.
• 58:02
  Speaker 2: Well, I think you should try.
• 58:06
  Speaker 4: And when he said that the guy he said it to just started chuckling.
• 58:10
  Speaker 4: He said you know, chief, I get it.
• 58:12
  Speaker 4: I think you're right, oh man.
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: Well, that's a good note to end on, guys.
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much for being here today on Beat Shifter.
• 58:21
  Speaker 2: Check the show notes.
• 58:22
  Speaker 2: We've got a link to the new book that's out, so you can get that out of our store Until next time.