Adventures In Customer Service

(From the Janesville Messenger, 10-19-08)

There is an old joke about service after the sale. The joke goes that a recently deceased soul is given a tour of both Heaven and Hell before deciding where he would like to spend eternity.

When he visits Hell, it looks like a big fun party, much more exciting than the sedate and boring Heaven. He chooses Hell, but when he goes back there, it’s no party at all; it’s eternal suffering. When he protests to Satan and asks why it was different in his previous visit, Satan replies, “Before, you were a prospect. Now, you’re a customer.”

That’s the way I feel right now about several of my experiences with home improvement.

Exhibit number one is Eon, a Canadian company that made the material we used to build our back deck and stairs. Eon makes an interesting polymer product for decks that is advertised as an alternative to wood or composites that resists cracking or splitting. Their product is also backed by a 25-year warranty, and I always feel good about putting 25 years between home improvement projects.

All went well until about two and a half years after the deck was built. We discovered a crack in one of the posts, as well as a couple of decorative parts. Relatively minor stuff, but worth replacing. So I followed the instructions on Eon’s web site and made a claim, which involved sending them digital photos of the damage and a copy of my receipt.

A customer service rep told us that “shortly,” we would be receiving a letter in the mail regarding the status of our claim. Apparently, in Canadian English, “shortly” means “never.” Finally, four months later, I re-contacted Eon to find out the status of my claim. At that point, they sent me a letter denying my claim – not because my claim was without merit but because they are having some sort of dispute with the Big Home Improvement Company that sold me the product.

The letter, a grammatical wonder, refers to their “Warranty Police” (policy?) that states, “This warranty does not cover product that have (sic) not been paid for in full. As (Big Home Improvement Company) has not paid us for this merchandise, we accordingly are not honouring the warranty, as the warranty specifically excludes such coverage.”

As copouts go, this might be one of the better ones. I guess I am supposed to march into the office of Big Home Improvement Company’s CEO and demand that they settle their dispute with Eon. Good plan, Eon; I’m right on it. And I hope the customer service rep is proud that she saved her multimillion-dollar company about $60 worth of replacement parts.

Meaningless warranties seem to be a pattern in the home improvement industry. Not long after I purchased my house, it was re-roofed with a shingle that had one of those 25-year guarantees I like so well. By the time the roof was on its ninth year, the shingles had already deteriorated badly, curling, cracking, and loading up our gutters with muck.

Our roofer told us that the shingle company had stopped manufacturing this particular type of asphalt shingle because they had been failing relatively quickly. This looked like a clear case for exercising our warranty and getting our shingles replaced.

The company’s first response was to offer us about two hundred dollars worth of coupons for new shingles. Having paid almost $10,000 for a roof, this really wasn’t what I had in mind. The offers didn’t get much better from there. From our experience, as well as other stories I read online, it appeared that the company’s tactic was to stall and make lowball offers and hope you gave up. We ended up doing something we hoped we would never have to do – hire a lawyer and threaten to sue.

Getting an attorney woke them up, and we ended up settling the case. Still, it meant having to re-roof for the second time in a decade, and the settlement didn’t even cover half of our cost. In case you are wondering, the only reason the manufacturer’s name is not listed in this article is because it might violate the final settlement we signed. But if you Google the term “shingle failure,” you might be able to figure it out.

Alas, poor customer service in the home improvement industry is not limited to great big faceless companies. The same year that our deck was built, a local contractor poured a new driveway for us. The driveway looked sterling for about six months, until a crack the size of a California fault line developed. When we complained to the contractor, he told us that that was “normal,” but promised that he would come out and take a look at it. Nearly three years later, we still await his visit. If he ever does come by, he’ll see that, besides the cracks, the concrete he poured now has more chinks and pock marks than a teenager’s face – and a teenager would be a decade older than my driveway.

As frustrating as those situations have been, it heightens my appreciation for the folks who do it right. I highly recommend a book by Hal Becker called “Lip Service,” where he chronicles his own personal experiences with really bad – and really good – customer service.

(p.s. After this column appeared, I received a response from Eon apologizing for causing me "distress" and alerting me that the parts were on the way. And they, indeed, have now arrived.)