How to Respond When a Customer Is Hurt in Your Work Area

Why this matters

The customer walks into the garage to ask a question, catches a foot on your extension cord, and goes down hard. What you do in the next minute is remembered for years, by them and, if it goes that way, by an insurance adjuster. A tech who helps first, keeps it calm, makes the area safe and writes down what happened protects the customer and the shop at the same time. A tech who freezes, or who starts explaining why it was not really the cord, does neither.

The duty here is not OSHA's. OSHA's standards protect your employees; a homeowner in their own house is outside them, and what you owe the customer is the ordinary duty of care any business owes the people around its work. That is a legal question with state-specific answers, and nothing below is legal advice. What follows is the practical sequence. It assumes the first-aid training a responder actually needs (see related: How to Choose First Aid and CPR Training for the Crew).

The first minute, as it sounds

TECH:      Stay down a second. Where does it hurt?
CUSTOMER:  My wrist. I'm fine, I just feel stupid.
TECH:      Don't worry about that. Did you hit
           your head at all?
CUSTOMER:  No. My hand and my knee.
TECH:      Can you wiggle your fingers for me?
CUSTOMER:  Yeah. Ow. It's swelling already.
TECH:      OK. Is anyone else home?
CUSTOMER:  My husband's upstairs.
TECH:      I'll get him in a second. Do you want me
           to call 911, or do you want to get it
           looked at today another way?
CUSTOMER:  No ambulance. He can drive me.
TECH:      All right. Let me shut this machine off
           and get you a cold pack. I'm sorry this
           happened.

What the tech does not say matters as much. No "you should have stayed out of the garage," no "that cord was taped down," no "our insurance will cover it." "I'm sorry this happened" expresses concern without claiming cause, and it is all the moment needs.

The steps

1. Stop whatever is still running, then go to the person. If the hazard is still active (a drain machine turning, a saw spinning, a live cord with exposed conductors, a ladder still falling), stopping it is part of the first aid, because it keeps the injury from getting worse and keeps you from being hurt too. Something that cannot be stopped from where you stand, such as an overhead line or bad air, means you call 911 and do not go in (see related: Rescuing Without Becoming the Second Victim). Skip this and the customer's fall becomes two injuries.

2. Give care within your training. Ask before you touch, tell them what you are doing, and do only what you have been trained to do: pressure on bleeding, a cold pack on a swelling joint, keeping them still if they may have hurt their neck or back (see related: Falls From Ladders and Possible Spinal Injury). Ask if they hit their head; a head strike, especially for an older adult or someone taking blood thinners, means an evaluation even when they insist they are fine (see related: Head Injuries and Concussion on the Job). Skip it and the most important thing in the first minute, the person, waits behind your nerves.

3. Call 911, or make sure they get seen. Call 911 if they are unresponsive, confused, struggling to breathe, bleeding heavily, have a possible neck, back or head injury, or cannot get up (see related: Calling 911 From a Job Site So They Find You). Short of that, offer to call, and if they decline, make sure someone can take them to be checked, and that they are not left alone. An adult who refuses help has the right to; respect it, offer again once, and note that you offered. Skip it and a fracture or a slow bleed goes home untreated.

4. Secure the hazard for everyone else, and photograph it before you change it. Coil the cord, close the hatch, cone the wet floor, put the tool away. But first take two or three photos of the area as it was: where the cord ran, the cones or tape that were up (or were not), the lighting, the floor. Those photos are facts nobody can reconstruct later. Do not rearrange the scene to look better; that is the one thing worse than having no photos.

5. Write down facts and witnesses, while they are fresh. On the job record or a notepad, within the hour: the time, the exact spot, what you saw (not what you think caused it), what the person said in their own words, what care was given, whether 911 was called or declined, and who else saw it, with names and phone numbers. "Customer caught right foot on extension cord across garage threshold, fell onto left hand" is a fact. "Customer wasn't watching where she was going" is an opinion, and it reads badly later.

6. Call the office before you leave the site. Not a text at the end of the day. The office needs to know now, so that the owner can call the customer, and so the shop can notify its general liability insurer promptly. Most liability policies require notice of an occurrence that may lead to a claim as soon as practicable, whether or not anyone has made a claim yet; read your own policy's notice condition and ask your agent what it means for you. Late notice is a common reason an insurer contests coverage.

7. Do not argue fault, promise payment or sign anything. No discussion of who is to blame, no "we'll pay for the doctor," no written statement handed to the customer, no social media post. Offers to pay medical bills, statements of fault and what a given apology does or does not count as all vary by state and by policy. Concern is always right; anything about money or responsibility goes through the owner and the insurer. Skip this rule and a tech's well-meant sentence on the driveway becomes the shop's position.

8. Follow up, as the owner. A call from the owner later that day or the next morning: how are you, did you get it looked at, is there anything you need from us. That call is about the person, not the claim, and it is the one that most customers remember.

Worked example: the garage threshold

A plumber, Ray, is running a drain machine in a customer's garage to clear a laundry line. The extension cord runs from an outlet in the house across the threshold of the door into the garage. He has a cone by the door but no cord cover over the threshold.

10:12. The homeowner, a woman in her 70s, opens the house door to ask how long he will be, catches her foot on the cord at the threshold and falls forward onto her left hand and right knee.

10:12 to 10:13, steps 1 and 2. Ray releases the machine's foot pedal and the cable stops; he leaves the machine where it is. He kneels beside her and has the exchange above. She did not hit her head, can move her fingers, her wrist is swelling, and her knee has a scrape that is oozing a little.

10:14, step 3. She declines 911. Her husband is upstairs and can drive her. Ray goes to the stair and calls him down, so she is not alone and does not try to stand by herself.

10:15. Gloves on, he puts a gauze pad on the knee and a cold pack, wrapped in a cloth, on the wrist. He does not try to straighten or splint anything.

10:20, step 4. With the husband sitting with her, Ray takes three photos: the cord across the threshold from the house side, the cone by the door, and the door from the garage side. Then he unplugs the cord and coils it.

10:22, step 5. He writes the time, the location (house-to-garage door threshold), what he saw, her words ("I didn't see the cord"), the care given, that 911 was offered and declined, and the husband as the only other person present, with his phone number.

10:25, step 6. He calls the office. The office manager logs it and tells the owner, who notifies the shop's liability insurer at 11:40 the same morning with Ray's notes and photos.

10:35. The husband drives her to urgent care. Ray finishes nothing until he has asked whether they want him to come back another day; they say finish, and he does, with a cord cover over the threshold this time.

Next morning, step 8. The owner calls. Her wrist is sprained, not broken, and she wants the job finished on Thursday as scheduled. The owner asks if there is anything she needs, says nothing about fault, and books Thursday.

What would have changed it. Had she hit her head, or seemed confused, or been unable to get up, Ray would have called 911 at 10:13 and kept her still rather than calling her husband to help her up. Had she been unresponsive, the first move would have been to check breathing and start CPR if needed (see related: First Aid + AED on the Jobsite). Had she hurt herself on her own step stool in another room, nothing in steps 1 to 3 would change: care first, regardless of whose hazard it was. Steps 5 and 6 would still happen, since the shop needs a record of an injury on a job site even when its own work was not involved.

The failure this prevents. The version without a sequence: Ray helps her up too fast, says "I had a cone right there," coils the cord, forgets to call the office, and the shop learns about it from a claims letter three weeks later with no photos, no notes and a tech's recollection against a customer's.

References

• Insurance Services Office, commercial general liability coverage form (duties in the event of an occurrence; read your own policy)
• American Red Cross and American Heart Association first aid guidelines
• See related: The First Five Minutes After Someone Is Hurt; Calling 911 From a Job Site So They Find You; Head Injuries and Concussion on the Job
• See related: Accident and Incident Reporting SOP; How to Clean Up Blood in a Customer Home