Topic: Anticipating and Minimizing the Impact of Common Resident Mistakes

I’ve decided that the North Texas Tollway Authority has to be one of the easiest companies to do business with! They've always handled my problems very quickly, but today they blew my mind! While passing thru the booth at the airport, I took out the arm! Yep! I was chatting it up with my mom (who I had just picked up) when, BAM! There went the arm flying out to the side! I stopped and started looking for my insurance immediately. The NTTA guy says, "You’ll have to back up and go back thru the toll tag lane. "I said "that's it?" Yep. That's it! I look in my rear view mirror and they had already re-installed the arm! And, there is no damage to my car because the entire arm is padded! So, they've obviously had this happen a million times! (Thank god, I'm not the only idiot!) Even though this happens at no fault of NTTA, they have taken steps to minimize the damage to their customers’ cars and time delays to other drivers! It got me wondering if we could do a better job of minimizing the effects of the most common mistakes made by our residents. A mirrored application would be padding our gates to minimize the damage to their cars. I know I was never consciously concerned about the damage to their car because I always assumed they were trying to follow someone into the property. But, what if it was a mistake? I realize it's a bit different because we somewhat rely on the damage to their car to figure out who caused the damage to our gates! Two years ago, we went thru this exercise and identified two situations that frequently occurred. One, the resident shows up to move in, hasn't set up their electricity and the unit has no electricity (I know most of us use CSAs, but it happens) and two, the resident shows up a day early to move in. We put steps in place at that time to minimize the negative impact to the resident, but I wonder if it’s time to look at them again and I definitely want to look into other examples that are occurring. Food for thought. Love to hear your feedback. Oh, and heads up! Watch out for those toll booth arms!