People are funny and in this regular series, our bathroom retailer proves it, recalling some of the craziest moments they’ve had dealing with customers.
During Covid, we had a break from site calls and surveys. It was nice for a time, but we did miss seeing clients’ homes and checking installations.
We’ve been back into the swing of it recently and loving every minute of it. However, the joy was quickly extinguished by one client’s cat. Said client had gone away halfway through their installation and left their cat at home. There was a cat sitter coming in and feeding the furry cutie but, generally, the fitters were the cat’s only company while the owner was away.
This was not a problem, until the cat had a nasty poop one day and it was dangling and running down its back legs. The fitters were freaking out as the cat was essentially smearing poop around this client’s high-end property and no one on site had any experience with cats, so they didn’t know how to help the poor creature.
Two of the showroom team had to go to site to attend to the feline and save the client’s cream sofa from a terrible fate. This was certainly not on the risk assessment.
Talking about running around from place to place, we call delivery people a range of things here at our showroom – all polite, I promise. For example, we might say couriers, carriers, posties, drivers…
So when a new team member was asking us why two drivers were needed for two spotlights, it took us a minute to understand what she meant. She had ordered two lights for a job and we said don’t forget they will need two drivers.
She assumed that meant two couriers. Good job she asked, otherwise this would have been rather embarrassing down the line if she had gone months thinking all lights ordered needed such an entourage.
Continuing the running theme, have you ever had a client who is on and on at you during the project by email, text, WhatsApp, phone and then, once the project is complete and money is due, they suddenly aren’t so easily contactable?
It had been a while for us, so we were shocked when recently, on completion, a client was delaying payment. After chasing them for ages, she said she wasn’t in town, so hadn’t had time to check the finished room before paying.
Well, that very same day, someone from our team spotted her in John Lewis. Adding insult to injury, she was buying towels for her new bathroom. The super-sleuthing worked in our favour when we emailed her, saying we knew she was in town, as we saw her in John Lewis and the towels suited the bathroom perfectly. Within five minutes, we had the funds.