Brindle Media

Posts Tagged ‘Home Depot’

In September, I wrote about about a customer service problem I experienced with my local Home Depot. Since Brindle Media’s services include marketing, branding and customer service, I thought it would be useful and fair to the Home Depot organization to to share my experience and post this follow-up.

A brief overview: Due to negligence on the part of the plumbing subcontractor that installed a water heater which I’d purchased at Home Depot in late July, our laundry room was flooded. The plumber paid for an emergency crew to dry out the laundry room and installed some dry wall which had to be removed but refused to take responsibility for restoring the room to its original state. The plumbing company then proceeded to turn the victim into a victimizer and accused me of trying to rip them off. That whole process took us to mid-September. When I complained to the local Home Depot who had hired the subcontractor for installation, their position was that I needed to negotiate directly with the subcontractor. This is where social media and customer service entered the picture.

After blogging about the problem on September 14th, I Twittered about the blog and hash-tagged Home Depot. Within minutes of that tweet, I was contacted by Michael at Home Depot’s customer care center in Atlanta who then connected me with Stephanie in the company’s Customer Care Social Media department. Within 48 hours, I was connected with Sedgwick Claims Management and on October 22nd received a check to cover the cost restoring our laundry and family rooms to a semblance of their pre-accident state.

As a customer, I was very satisfied with my treatment by Michael and Stephanie on behalf of Home Depot and by Tammy at Sedwick CMS. The good news is that the situation was resolved. The bad news is that the resolution took three months. It was interesting and disturbing that no one on the regional or local level at Home Depot ever bothered to follow up.

So the lesson here is that when you encounter a customer service problem with a national retail chain, social media tools like Twitter and Facebook can provide you the leverage that you need to get the attention of the customer service department and help resolve a problem using a top-down rather than a bottom-up approach.

Hopefully, you won’t ever find yourself in a situation where you’ll need to employ this advice !

To be fair, Michael from Home Depot’s customer care department contacted me within minutes of my blog posting explaining my recent adventure. Another customer care rep, Stephanie from the corporate office, has been working to try and resolve the situation but her efforts to connect me with the regional Home Depot people here in the Saratoga area have not yet been successful. I appreciate her efforts but I wanted to share some of the comments I received to my initial posting:

Peter wrote: “When I renovated my home in Rockville years ago, I bought the appliances and most stuff from Lowe’s. However, since Lowe’s was farther away, I opted to hire a contractor recommended by Home Depot (after buying some more things from them). Home Depot is the worst. The Lowe’s contractor finally straightened out what the Home Depot contractor did wrong/failed to do. One of the best examples? I asked the Home Depot supplied electrician to connect a dimmer switch to the chandelier in my dining room. They did, and it didn’t dim the chandelier, but rather caused the lights to go off and on in a bizarre pattern, with some bulbs popping like in a bad movie, smoke to issue from the chandelier, and the circuit breaker to blow. Guess they didn’t teach the Home Depot ‘partner’ what ‘ground’ and ‘hot’ mean in electrician school… apparently, I was lucky not to have lost the whole house to an inferno...”

Lynn wrote: “I have been on a mission for quite some time to let everyone know NOT to hire people whom Home Depot employs(or suggests)as subcontractors. I have yet to see one job completed by any of these subs that has come up to the standards of most LICENSED, INSURED contractors.The best thing you can do in the future is NOT hire anyone from a home store like that until you have properly checked out their credentials and/or referrals, as you would do with anyone working in a trade. It sounds to me like your plumbers might not be properly insured, as they should have had NO problem in correcting THEIR mistake. As for Home Cheapo…keep on them too, especially to report the plumbers as ‘Sub’ standard in their quality of work .”

Jeff wrote: “Been there done that with Home Depot. We use Lowe’s now (in our experience, much better customer service). Like you, we bought an expensive product from Home Depot and they farmed out the installation. When things did not go right (which, of course, they didn’t), Home Depot would not take any responsibility. And neither would the contractor. It was not a fun situation. We have not had a similar scenario with Lowe’s”

The adventure continues….

Addendum added on 9/17/09:

Home Depot has connected me with their insurance company and I’ve been asked to provide estimates for the project so that we can resolve this matter. I can’t say they I envy the customer service reps
their jobs but at least dealing with them has been a positive experience.