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Egg beater

I heard the collective “Gasp” as the internet world clicked to read my comments on “LARA G”. (All 3 of you…. God bless your misguided souls

) You’re asking yourself right now… “Did he just call the customer a liar!?” Well, not exactly, just as Joe Wilson didn’t call President Obama a liar, he simply said what the President was saying was factually bankrupt, in a rude and disrespectful manner IMHO. But let’s not get into politics…

So most of us in customer service have been taught early in our careers that “The customer is always right”. But are they really “Always Right” or was that just a corporate attempt to profit by appeasing every person to break through the threshold of their businesses? Creating a mentality that I can get away with just about anything and no one is going to stand up to me because “I’m the CUSTOMER and I’m ALWAYS right!” Well I don’t really subscribe to that philosophy (maybe to my own demise? You be the judge of that). I mean if a customer is right, and has been wronged by a business or that businesses employee, by all means that company should do whatever it can to rectify the situation even if it means it costs them money (lost profit on said job, sale etc). However if a customer is wrong and is trying to manipulate a situation or take advantage of a business ,they should be called out on it and gently told “I’m sorry but you or what you’re doing isn’t right”. If you REALLY want read more about that, seems I’m not the alone in my thoughts…

http://positivesharing.com/2006/07/why-the-customer-is-alway s-right-results-in-bad-customer-service/

Back to our little story:
Here are the facts concerning “LARA G”, egg whipping, cream beating martini extraordinaire.

• We don’t know who she is (I’ve interrogated both my upper level managers and every employee that could have come in contact with her.. she’s a mystery…. Even has the sun glasses to play the part)
• LARA G has cut and pasted this review on at least 3 different sites, so we are assuming that if we messed up, it must have been REALLY bad, yet no one can remember this lady.
• My very talented, most awesome-ist Mr. Appliance Service Manager has tried since May to get her to respond through one of the web sites internal messaging (mainly because I told him he is not to sleep until he finds out what happened to this poor lady to make her so mad AND find out who didn’t respond to her repeated cries for help.) with zero success.
• After months of sleep deprivation and a nervous breakdown (for fear of losing his job) my most awesome-ist Service Manager came to me and admitted he failed me and could not get her to respond and find out why she was so un happy and what went wrong. (ok, I’m embellishing … I let him go home at night and sleep)
• The first of September, I contacted LARA G, egg whipping, cream beating martini extraordinaire, through the yelp internal messaging system and here is what I wrote her (And got a response within the hour)

BIG BAD MEAN NASTY CONFRONTATIONAL BUSINESS OWNER:

“Hi Lara, thank you giving us an opportunity to make this right for you and I am sorry that you had a bad experience with our company. I personally started this company from scratch out of our house over 10 years ago it has grown bigger than our wildest dreams. We now have 15 full time employees a 5000 square foot office/retail/service center, and trucks running all over town giving customers great service day in and day out. The down side of that is I can’t personally make every service call myself so I've had to hire people, and trust they will treat the business as their own. For the most part we do a fantastic job, although in your case that wasn't true (again my apologies). It is my understanding that this has been resolved to your satisfaction and if so, would you kindly post a follow up or remove the negative rating? If it has NOT been resolved I would personally invite you my cell phone and let me know what we can do to make it right. That number is xxx/xxx/xxx. Thank you again and look forward to your response. Charlie Goff”

Egg beating, cream whipping martini extraordinaire ..... LARA G wrote:

“Charlie -

I appreciate you contacting me, but this matter has NOT been resolved to my satisfaction. Nothing has been done by your company to fix this issue. My husband fixed the icemaker himself, so it's operational at the moment. I can't think of anything that you can do, at this point, to resolve this issue except for to refund my money. My husband was able to modify the replacement part that your crew installed and make it so that the icemaker is once again functional, so I'd be willing to let you keep the money for YOUR cost of the part, but if you are really interested in turning this into a positive experience for me and convincing me that your company deserves to have the review amended or removed, I don't think that I should have to pay for your markup on the part cost or for any labor, since my icemaker still didn't work when your crew left. I do admire the fact that you have created this company yourself and that you are taking the time to contact me. I also notice that lots of previously negative reviews of your business have been disappearing, so can only assume that I'm not the only person that you've contacted. . (Side note- I have no idea what she’s talking about… she’s my first and only review- notice the neat little star burst by her picture)
That does say something positive, in my mind, but, as of now, my review is accurate”

So, let’s digest this for a moment. I contact her to see if the problem is resolved and she says it’s not. She says the only way I MIGHT be able to turn this around is to give her some money back cause her hubby has already fixed the problem. Sounds reasonable to me, however I want my staff to learn from this bad experience so as to never put a customer through this ( whatever “this” is we still don’t know.. .to this day) again so I not only offer her a partial refund (which is what she asked for)I tell her I will give her a full refund AND fix the ice maker so it won’t randomly turn itself off if she can kindly tell me who the offending people are that work for me and what went so wrong to make her post this horrible review everywhere she could. I mean we have really blown it here and when I find out who did it, they are going to be so fired their KIDS won’t be able to get a job! Seriously i REALLY want to know what happend. At this point I must point out, that if you are still reading, you should really find a hobby

(hi mom!) Read on.

BIG BAD MEAN NASTY CONFRONTATIONAL BUSINESS OWNER:

“So maybe I’m confused then, as my service manager says he has sent you several messages via maybe the 2 or 3 other sights we found this review posted on and didn’t hear anything back. That’s why I’m now involved. If you didn’t get those messages, I apologize, he is sending me them tonight so I can review them to see when and how they we sent. In order for me to look into this I need to know who you are so I can pull you up in my system and review the details of the service. Could I have your info to look it up? I’m guessing at this point that we must have went out several times to try and fix this and couldn’t? That would be odd but possible I suppose. And if that not it, then you must have called in to try and get the issue resolved and no one could help you? That again would be so unlike my team but I want every last detail so I can get to the bottom of how our system "broke" and made you this un happy. I don’t know if you have your own business or not but we all know that, even as consumers, if a company does a great job for us, we expect that, and should, they might be lucky if we told one person about it. If we are wronged or a company doesn’t live up to our expectations we are going to probably tell 20 people about, or in this case post it all over the internet for the world to see. The truth about my company (as a whole) isn’t reflected accurately in your post, but un fortunately you’re the only review I have. Truth be known that if 100% of the people that I’ve done business for posted on here, yours would be buried into oblivion with lavish, positive remarks. This is honestly an embarrassment to me because I take pride in my business; it’s what feeds my family and the families that work here. We care about each and every customer. So with that being said I’d be happy to refund 100% of your money,fix the ice maker correctly and try and "save face" to what has been a bad service experience for you. But in order for me to do that I want every last detail as to the chain of events that led up to you somehow slipping thru the cracks and not being handled in manner that would have added you to the list of thousands of satisfied customers. Again thank you for taking time out of your day to discuss this with me.”

And that was the end of our correspondence. Apparently I frightened off the egg whipping, cream beating martini sipping extraordinaire with my confrontational, rude dialog. After a few weeks of nothing …I posted this on yelp. (which i had to delete, post the link for this, and move my response here because they only give me 600 characters)

“We have been trying to contact "LARA G" since May of this year and received one response saying she still was not happy 3 weeks ago. We then offered her a FULL REFUND (that’s 350 dollars folks!) plus we would fix the issue to her satisfaction if she could only tell us the who she was, so that we may look up the details in our system and make things right. No response. At this point in time we have been unable to identify her as a customer who has used our service. We have been in business for over 10 years and hope to ad her to the list of thousands of happy customers! Call us LARA G!! “

Which prompted LARA G, egg whipping, cream beating martini extraordinaire to write this on Yelps site……

“Regarding Charlie's comment below:
He did contact me and ask me what it would take to get me to remove my review. If you're paying attention, you'll notice that there were previously 4 or 5 negative of reviews of Mr. Appliance on this website that have since disappeared. (not true) He has been methodically contacting negative reviewers and convincing them to remove them. (how would she know this? Again factually challenged statements, she was my first and for a while my only review) It's true that he did ask for my contact info so that he could look into the matter. My husband has already fixed the icemaker himself, so there are no further repairs that need to be done, and Charlie never offered to refund my money. Frankly, he was so confrontational and rude that I was frightened and didn't feel comfortable giving him my last name and address so that he could "look me up".

I don't issue negative reviews lightly; if you'll check my other reviews, you'll see that they are overwhelmingly positive. I know the consequences for a business to having a negative review, so I don't write one unless I had an atrocious experience and the business REALLY deserves it. This business really does.”

Now that last big lie, um, I mean factually challenged statement, did it for me, that i never offered to refund her money. And in case she desides to come back on and modify her post and say i "altered" her response or some other false statements i've got screen shots of the actual text right off Yelps site and will post if needed. It’s one thing to not be happy with my service, rag on my company and never tell me what we did or if we ever had the chance to make it right, but its another to flat out call me a liar and make false statements in front of the world. If it weren’t for that, I would have just left well enough alone and not wasted HOURS of my time, that I’ll never get back, writing this crazy blog (which I’ve never done before but boy this is therapeutic!

) just to say the simple phrase “The customer is always right” isn’t so. In fact sometimes they LIE, um I mean make factually bankrupt statements and pass them as truth to the world.

In all seriousness we strive to make each customers experience, from the time the phone is answerd, to the follow up call after service is complete, the best home service experience out there. Do we miss the mark sometimes? You bet. Will we go above and beyond to make it right? Even if that means we have to "eat it"? Absolutely. We have an amazing hand picked team at Mr. Appliance and each one of them cares about thier customer. Our phones are answered 24/7 and in the event a problem should arise and my talented staff doesnt give you the answer your looking for (its rare but it happens) you can always talk to me, the owner.

LARA G, egg beating, cream whipping, martini sipping extraordinaire…. We wish you the best with your new service provider!

Cheers!

Posted by yelpster on 2009-10-14 01:23:35 | Rating: