Dear Mr Murphy.
We installed a drinking water system for you at your request in 2022. When we carried out this work, you requested that we contact you on a 12 month basis to undertake the necessary maintenance on the equipment ongoing. We therefore tried to make contact with you on a number of occasion by telephone, leaving messages, but our calls were not returned. We then received an e-mail requesting that we delay the Service, which we did. When contact was finally re-established, we managed to get a firm agreement from you for an appointment for a Service Engineers to carry out the necessary work - by this stage several months now overdue and despite our best efforts to organise this in a timely manner. Even with good procedures in place to be able to co-ordinate these type of appointments, it still takes a great deal of time and effort on the part of our admin staff to organise the many hundreds of similar engineers visits we routinely attend every month.
Readers will therefore perhaps appreciate why their was indeed a degree of frustration in the office when having finally committed and agreed to a date and time slot (mutually agreed I might add), you then came back to us at a later occasion stating that the Engineer would need to arrive at exactly 3pm, (with no leeway) or find an alternative date, as you had since arranged another more pressing commitment. We had already scheduled the route and booked all the appointments in the diary for that day! Whilst you say "that you did not appreciate that an exact time was difficult to arrange," I would ask you to consider the following points:
* All of our Engineers work involves the water supply to the property and our works always involving intercepting a live water supply, isolating it and carrying out the work. This is not always straight-forward as some fittings can occasionally leak when touched, requiring additional work.
* Many of our Water Treatment Engineers Service & Maintenance visits involves fault diagnosis - Therefore you will appreciate that it is not always easy to attribute a precise time scale to each job.
* Being a mid-afternoon appointment; you were one of several appointments that day and as the day goes on, whilst we can be punctual for appointments at the start of the day, the likelihood is that afternoon appointments will be noticeably less punctual....which is exactly why we provide a 1-2 hour appointment window. This is also the same reason why Utility Companies (and the like) will only offer at best an AM or PM time slot for an engineers visit.
Perhaps when you consider all of the above and make a small allowance for the significant amount of roads across the entire Region that were routinely flooded and closed this past winter, you may appreciate the daily challenges of keeping a fleet of Company vans and employees operating to exact times for Service Engineers covering the whole of rural East Anglia. It is, in reality, quite unrealistic to promise pin-point timings that we would struggle to honour - Which is why we don't do it.
Had you have been easier to communicate with in the months prior to organising this work, at your request, then your somewhat unfair criticism of our Customer Service would not have been necessary.
I also find it interesting that you were able to compose and publish a One Star, Negative Feedback Review on two independent Online platforms all within 30 minutes of receiving our e-mail....a significantly different rate of response to our efforts made in trying to organise your Service Visit.
I also question that if you were unhappy in any way, you had every opportunity to pick up the phone and physically speak to somebody here about it - Instead you simply elected to tell the whole world without first offering us the opportunity to redress your dissatisfaction on what is, in essence, a storm in a tea-cup!
Clive D Stevens - Company Director
