Some Companies’ Idea Of Customer Service Sucks!

I really don’t understand how some companies stay in business!

Let me explain …

We recently experienced one of the coldest nights of the year – 12 degrees (and that’s Fahrenheit)!

Needless to say, some of our pipes froze, and in the morning, we found that we had no water.

Initial superficial investigations revealed no obvious leaks, so we rang our usual plumber, whom we found back in April and who has turned out to be one of the best trademen I have ever come across – he goes out of his way to be helpful, and his approach to customer service mirrors what we try to achieve with our own pet health business.

Anyway, Bill came out on the next day – a Saturday – to take a look, and much as we feared, it wasn’t anything Bill could fix as it was the well pump that wasn’t working.

Bill very kindly lent us a 50-gallon tank of water for us to use until we could get our water supply restored, and on Monday, we rang a local well company, Copperstate, who have numerous large ads in the local Yellow Pages, to see if they could come and see what the problem was.

Monday afternoon, they came, as promised, which was an encouraging start, and confirmed that the well pump would have to be pulled, as it wasn’t the control box in the pump house that had failed.

They gave us rough estimates of how much it would cost and how soon they could do the job, but promised to give us a call to confirm the figures and timescales.

Tuesday came and went, with no call. Even though our luck was out, as we lost phone and Internet for over 24 hours too, we’d rung and left our cell phone number so that they could contact us, but that was obviously no use either.

On Wednesday, we rang Bill to ask if he could give them a nudge, and as it happened, he ran into the guy who’d come on Monday in a local hardware store.

It turned out that Copperstate incorrectly thought they’d never dealt with us before, and therefore were worried we wouldn’t pay them for the work.

Bill assured them that we had always paid him promptly – we always gave him a (non-bouncing) cheque as soon as he presented us with his invoice, before he left for the day.

Thursday came and went too, and by then, having been without water for a week, we left a message with another well company, but they never called back.

Friday morning, I mentioned our predicament to Terry, our Schwan’s delivery guy, and he said one of his other customers, who lived not far from us, did well drilling for a living, and he gave us his number.

We called, and Merrill came around later that day to take a look.

He tried replacing the well control box first, as there was no point pulling the pump if it was just a $200 control box.

However, that work only proved that it was the pump that had failed.

We were initially told he could do the job on Monday, but then he rang back to say he could do the work the next day, on Saturday, which was good news.

On Saturday, he and his two helpers spent the day removing the old pump and installing the new one – over 360 feet below ground – and by the time they left in the evening, the well was pumping water again.

He returned on Sunday to finish the job off, repairing a few broken pipes in the pump house, and by the time it was time to go home and watch his NFL games, we had running water again throughout the house.

So, you have to ask yourself, if a company such as Copperstate advertises heavily, and at considerable expense, presumably to increase its business, why would they turn customers away, especially when the economic climate is supposedly so bad and when they have been assured that the customer will pay?

And why would you piss potential customers off by not even returning calls, as promised?

Don’t these idiots know that customers who have a bad experience with a company typically tell twice as many people about it as those who have a good experience?

In the meantime, we’ll continue to give our business to companies who know how to look after their customers.

Tags: cell phone number, pump house, g star, rough estimates, yellow pages, monday afternoon

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