Almost Excellent Customer Service Failure

I had the experience yesterday with a business that almost was going to be listed in the marketing excellence category, but completely blew it at the last moment. As consequence I went from becoming a loyal customer to one who is basically satisfied with their work.

I was having some interior work done on my house by a home renovation company that is an owner operator small business. This story is a perfect example of the failure of a business owner to take a problem and turn it into way of creating a loyal customer. As you may find on this site, I believe very strongly that problems in business sometimes present one of the best opportunities to create truly loyal customers.

The short version of what happened is that I needed an interior wall reduced in size and this required moving a light switch and the thermostat for my air conditioner. The contractor quoted me an amount for the job, which I thought was reasonable, and said the work could be done in one day. At the start of the job I showed him where the breaker was that controlled the light switch, but specifically stated that it didn’t turn off the power to the thermostat. He said no problem they would deal with that.

The thermostat was controlled by another breaker that they failed to disconnect. When they moved the thermostat it apparently resulted in a wire being shorted out and damage to a part of the system. The first day they could not figure out the problem and I was left without air conditioning that night and the job only half done. They were obviously frustrated, and so was my family, but no hard feelings and a promise to get it done first thing the next day.

The next day they didn’t arrive until after noon and began trying to figure out the problem. They decided to call an air conditioner technician and he determined the electrical problem due to failure to flip the breaker for the system when disconnecting and moving the thermostat. At this point the owner admitted it was his fault, and continued working on the job without directly asking for me to pay any of the extra expense of air conditioning technician .

When it was almost done we had a conversation about the problem and he stated that, although he admitted it was his fault, I had led him to believe the thermostat was disconnected when I turned off the breaker for the lights. I reminded him that I specifically said it was not turned off by that breaker and he had told me not to worry about that. He was evasive and did not admit that is what happened though not directly denying it.

OK, so now I have gone from being impressed with someone fixing their mistakes to being irritated that he attempted to pass part of the blame back to me for what ever reason. When time came to pay the bill I asked my wife to handle it because I was still a little irritated and busy feeding my kids. He then did the next thing that was a major mistake in my mind. My wife then said she was going to pay him the amount agreed upon, and he pulled the old trick of pretending he didn’t recall that amount and asked her if he had quoted a price higher. He indicated strongly that he thought he should be paid the higher price ($50 more) than he had quoted because of the extra expense and time of solving the electrical problem. Not a huge amount of money, but that isn’t the point. I just watched as she paid it.

So here is the central issue here. This business owner had the opportunity to turn his screw up into a situation in which I would have been very impressed with his integrity and become a loyal long time repeat customer. Sure, the job turned out to be more than he had thought, but it was clearly his mistake that caused the problem. I thought he was going to do it right, but at the last minute he attempted to pass off part of the blame to the customer and ask for more money to help cover his expenses. Very short sighted decision. I would have been considerably less irritated if he just asked out right for more money than they way he chose to handle it.

As it stands now I am satisfied with the end quality of the work he did, but have no enthusiasm for recommending him to anyone else. Will I use him again one day? Not sure about that. If I have another convenient option I certainly won’t feel any sense of loyalty to patronize his business.