An Example of Poor Customer Service
September 14th, 2009 | 
Author: On July 27th, I purchased a water heater at the Home Depot in Saratoga who subcontracted with a Glens Falls plumbing company, Goldentouch Plumbin & Heating to do the installation. Due to negligence on the part of the installers, which they readily admit, our laundry room was flooded soaking the wallboard on several walls and some of the carpeting in the adjoining family room.
Goldentouch arranged for a restoration company to come in and do some emergency work using industrial dehumidifiers and removing the damaged wallboard. But the plumber balked at paying for phase two of the project: replacing and repainting the wallboard which had been removed, reattaching the wall and door moldings, cleaning the mud off the laundry room floor which had been tracked in the by the restoration team and cleaning the carpet which was dirty from muddy shoes and soggy boxes of books that had been stored in a laundry closet. Instead, Goldentouch opted to replace the wallboard themselves but refused to take any responsibility for the rest of the cleanup.
I complained to Home Depot who contacted Goldentouch about the problem. Goldentouch accused me of trying to take advantage of them. I explained that I just wanted to have my laundry and family rooms restored to the conditions that they had been in prior to the installation of the water heater. Goldentouch’s attitude was that they were the victims and I was the victimizer. They inferred that it was suspicious that I didn’t want to simply make a claim with my insurance company. I explained that it didn’t make sense for my homeowner’s insurance policy to pay for their mistake. I was told that Goldentouch planned to turn the situation over to their attorney.
I returned to Home Depot to recap the latest developments. The customer service rep informed me that it wasn’t a Home Depot problem and that I would need to resolve the issue myself with Goldentouch. I disagreed and suggested that it was, indeed, Home Depot’s problem since they had sold me the water heater and hired the installer. I was told that the district manager would then contact me about the problem. That was a week ago. I’ve heard from no one since.
At this point, I can’t give high marks for customer service to either Home Depot or Goldentouch Plumbing & Heating in Glens Falls.
Posted in
Hi this is Michael from Home Depot Customer Care. I’m sorry about your experience with us. I would like to offer my help. Feel free to email me at michael_care@homedepot.com so I can look into this for you.
Michael
Customer Care
The Home Depot
Atlanta, GA 30339
Check out The Home Depot on Twitter, Facebook, & YouTube
I would like the chance to give the other side of this story. The plumbing contractor paid to have the water dried off the floor by a professional cleaning company, with no argument. Then the customer began to insist the whole basement be restored. Because he feared there was mold. Upon site visit it was very apparent the customer had a huge mold issue long before 5 gallons of water where spilled on the floor. Photos don’t lie and that’s the reason the issue was not pursued further. There was a humidifier leaking all over the floor. There was a leak in the sewer line leaking behind the washer and on the wall soaking the sheetrock. The corners of the basement (no where near the water) were riddled with mold from prior water damage. Heres a link ….. you be the judge of where the water damage came from.
http://brindle.moonfruit.com/#/brindle-basement/4549471439
In the spirit of transparency & authenticity, I approved the above comment from the contractor discussed in this blog to be published. Note that the event discussed occurred on July 27,2009 and the contractor responded nearly 20 months later on March 12, 2011.
Some background. The reason that I originally posted this blog was out of frustration. Being in business myself, I appreciate that customers can be annoying and I tried to have an understanding attitude. I also appreciated that due to his crew’s negligence the contractor had lost money on this deal. All I was asking was for our laundry room to be restored to its original condition prior to this accident. But he days turned into weeks then the weeks into a month with no resolution. To add insult to injury, the contractor’s female point person essentially accused me of being a crook and trying to rip them off! It was a nightmare.
Back to the contractor’s comment, the picture he’s attached is a compilation which shows where a leaky humidified had created some corrosion on the side of our furnace with an enlarged shot of the corrosion. At first glance, it looks like a wall has been corroded but it’s just the side of the furnace. When the contractor inspected our basement after his water heater installation crew had caused our laundry room to flood, we discussed this issue and I explained that there had been some slight leakage from the humidified which had caused occasional puddles on the floor but that they had never been large enough to reach the wallboard. His implication in the above comment, however, is that this was the cause of our problem.
To reiterate the situation, we purchased a water heater from Home Depot and were told that this contractor’s company would provide installation. When his crew installed the water heater, they apparently used the hose from our washing machine to drain water from the old heater and then neglected to attach the hose back into its appropriate drain pipe. The contractor admitted that his crew did this and that it had happened at other installations. Since the hose & drain pipe are behind the washing machine, it wasn’t obvious when we went downstairs later to do laundry later that afternoon.
However, when I went to the basement to put the laundry in the drier, I found at least water at least 1/2 deep covering most of our 11ft x 12ft laundry room and soaking into the carpeting of the adjoining family room. It took me a good 30 minutes of continuous bailing to get most of the water out of the room. I filled a 5 gallon bucket at least four or five times to haul most of the water out of our basement. That’s significantly more than the mere 5 gallons that he suggests was spilled. Since the floor in the room has a slight incline, most of the water was concentrated against two walls and the wallboard on those was soaked to about 18 inches above the floor. The water even penetrated the floor of a closed and soaked some cardboard boxes in which books were stored.
To put things in perspective, it took the emergency restoration crew which the contractor had hired three days using several industrial strength dehumidifiers to sufficiently dry out our basement and remove the damaged portions of the wall board. The contractor then decided that he would replace the wall board himself in order to save money. After doing a rather lousy job of it, he refused to paint it and to clean up the rest of the mess that had been created by the flooding. It’s pretty obvious from the attitude I experienced from his employee and from the comment above that somehow in his mind the contractor has become the victim and I’ve become the victimizer in this soap opera. Not a stellar example of good customer service in the 21st century.
In any case, after the contractor refused to complete the project and the local Home Depot refused to help, I decided to experiment with the power of social media. Home Depot corporate responded immediately, took responsibility, paid for our laundry room to be restored to its pre-flood condition, and salvaged a relationship with this customer. It was a textbook example of how to provide good customer service and a lesson which the contractor would be wise to learn.