Even the most conscientious and skilled sunroom installation teams
run into problems sometimes, and how companies handle these problems can be a tribute to their reputation. I’ve just been out on one such jobsite – a sunroom project that went awry for reasons both unexpected and complicated.
After numerous attempts to adjust the installation and please the homeowners – the company decided to take the sunroom down, rebuild the foundation, and start over with new materials.
Nobody was happy about this – not the dealer, who was losing money on the job, and not the homeowners, who didn’t expect to have the project going on a second time – right at the beginning of the outdoor season. Blooming daffodils were disrupted; newly seeded grass stepped on, and there is a graduation party looming on the horizon.
But the decision was made without rancor, without lawsuits, and hopefully there will be a very happy ending to this unhappy event.
The whole situation had me thinking about the whole process of customer satisfaction – not just in the home improvement field, but across the board. People expect to receive poor customer service – it’s almost not worth talking about. We expect to have our phone calls answered by a machine; we expect to be kept endlessly on hold; we expect that the retail clerk won’t know what is in stock, or the customer service agent to be unsmiling and terse. We’ve stopped expecting our medical care professionals to know our names, or remember why we were last there.
So when we do have a problem – and the party concerned responds competently and timely – we’re thrilled! What should be expected – has become unexpected.
It is very rare in the sunroom industry that an installation has so many problems that a tear down and rebuild is the only option. And even in these rare instances (as in the home I visited) , sometimes the root of the problem lies not in the product, nor in the way it was installed – but in pre-existing conditions at the house that were not apparent when the building began. But rather than become mired in who, or what, was to blame – this dealer chose the difficult and costly route to rebuild. He believed that his company, Betterliving, and the homeowners, were better served by this approach.
We’ll see.
After numerous attempts to adjust the installation and please the homeowners – the company decided to take the sunroom down, rebuild the foundation, and start over with new materials.
Nobody was happy about this – not the dealer, who was losing money on the job, and not the homeowners, who didn’t expect to have the project going on a second time – right at the beginning of the outdoor season. Blooming daffodils were disrupted; newly seeded grass stepped on, and there is a graduation party looming on the horizon.
But the decision was made without rancor, without lawsuits, and hopefully there will be a very happy ending to this unhappy event.
The whole situation had me thinking about the whole process of customer satisfaction – not just in the home improvement field, but across the board. People expect to receive poor customer service – it’s almost not worth talking about. We expect to have our phone calls answered by a machine; we expect to be kept endlessly on hold; we expect that the retail clerk won’t know what is in stock, or the customer service agent to be unsmiling and terse. We’ve stopped expecting our medical care professionals to know our names, or remember why we were last there.
So when we do have a problem – and the party concerned responds competently and timely – we’re thrilled! What should be expected – has become unexpected.
It is very rare in the sunroom industry that an installation has so many problems that a tear down and rebuild is the only option. And even in these rare instances (as in the home I visited) , sometimes the root of the problem lies not in the product, nor in the way it was installed – but in pre-existing conditions at the house that were not apparent when the building began. But rather than become mired in who, or what, was to blame – this dealer chose the difficult and costly route to rebuild. He believed that his company, Betterliving, and the homeowners, were better served by this approach.
We’ll see.
posted by Flat Andy at 3:13 PM
1 Comments:
I recently posted on another Flat Andy blog called "2-sides to every story." The blog was started to comment on how customer websites complaining about bad products/service were unfair and did not allow the vendor an opportunity to state their side of the story. I posted regarding a situation very similar in nature to the issue you've described above. In our case, the response was not so favorable. We were told that fixing the situation was not Betterliving's responsibility, but our responsibility. I found it ironic that as soon as I described a very unfavorable mold situation on a Betterliving-sponsored page, the blog was removed from your website. If there are two sides to every story, why was my side of the story removed from the site?
Sadly, we were not as fortunate as the customer you described above. No one at Betterliving went out of their way to make us happy let alone do what was right. We now have a sunroom whose foundation is completely infested with mold and we require extensive remediation to include a "tear down and rebuild" with the appropriate foundation. No one we have contacted so far has been willing to do what is necessary to fix this situation. Very unfortunate...
GR
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