The screed is a little late today because I’ve been tied up on the phone trying to get the central air conditioning fixed. This saga started a week ago when I noticed that the house seemed rather warm. While the vents were blowing air, it was not cold air. I called the American Home Shield folks with whom we have a warranty and they set me up with a local repair firm. This is where the fun – and today’s business point – begin.
Last Wednesday, I set up an appointment for yesterday. They were supposed to arrive between 3 pm and 5 pm. I was not happy that it would take them almost a week to get to me, but I was told that’s the first appointment. On my calendar it went (not knowing that AHS has a 48-hour service policy, by the way, and that I could have asked them to set me up elsewhere. Doh!).
At 4:30 yesterday when no one had arrived or called to say they’d be arriving, I called the repair folks. The customer service rep had my info from AHS but didn’t have my appointment. In fact, she said they’d tried to call me, failed to reach me, and never set anything up.Obviously, someone screwed up and didn’t write down the initial appointment. I was told that after 8 minutes on hold, a hang-up, and calling them back. Needless to say, I wasn’t happy, but I became far less happy when I was told that the next available appointment was next week sometime, two weeks after I initially set up a repair with them. The manager got on the phone to inform me that I was making the whole appointment up. I offered to email him screenshots of my phone’s call log, showing that I spoke with them twice last week but he didn’t care. I asked him if he was in the habit of making up appointments and adding them to his calendar because I certainly wasn’t. He wasn’t either. I asked him if he was calling me a liar and he said he didn’t know what I was but I certainly never had an appointment. Finally, I mentioned that I wrote a business blog and that he was providing me with great material for what a business shouldn’t do and he laughed and said: “as long as you tell the truth.”
So I’m here to tell you the truth. None of us can ever call our customers liars or make them feel that way. None of us can ignore evidence that someone on our end screwed up and blame the customer instead. None of us can shrug our shoulders and tell a customer who has been harmed to get to the back of the line. Finally, none of us can ignore the potential social media backlash. Not that the screed is read by millions, but it only takes a few readers to start a backlash against your business. Hey – don’t you know who I think I am? The odds are you don’t know anything about the megaphone any of your customers hold but you should know that it doesn’t take more than a few minutes of writing to do a great deal of damage to your reputation.
AHS reached out to these bozos this morning. They again denied I ever spoke to them. We set up an appointment with another repair company, who called me 10 minutes after I spoke with AHS. By the way – when the new guys couldn’t see me until next week, AHS escalated my issue to a unit they have that will call all the area vendors to find someone who can cool me off (in both the physical and psychological sense at this point) in 48 hours or less.
So to the folks at Modern Mechanical HVAC, hopefully this will help you see why you can’t call your customers liars, along with the bad Yelp review, the link to this screed I’ll be posting on Nextdoor (a local bulletin board), and a bunch of other local information and review sites that will advise people to stay away from you. I’m just doing as you asked: telling the truth.
Consult Keith 