POOR SERVICE

Dear Mike Aitken

I am disappointed that you did not understand my email to Burgess Plumbing. I addressed the measurements of the job in generic terms, which would allow for a reasonable estimate of the Bill of Materials (BOM). Your reply indicates that you ignored my arguments for the quote being over the top by a factor of 2. This would not be the case, if you and your team had done a professional job, by using a BOM, instead of trying to take me for a ride.

Reminder: My estimate for a fair quote was around R7 600.00 (not your unreasonable quote of about R14 300.00).

As a result of your unresponsive reply to my email, and what I deemed to be an unreasonable quote, I decided to go to one of your competitors for the work. I obviously gave them no information about my attempt to engage BURGESS PLUMBING for the work, or your quote, or my estimate. They quoted R7 614.00, so they got the work.

In addition, I would like to point out the following customer service experience:

My first call to Burgess Plumbing was on Thursday 24/11/2022, when the roof pipe started leaking. Your team arrived at my house within 2 hours to confirm the work scope. I only received the quote 5 DAYS later, on Tuesday 29/11/2022, after I followed up with your control centre. I responded to your excessive quote with a request that you reconsider the quote based on BOM arguments that I included in my request and received confirmation that it had been passed on to you within an hour of receiving the quote. Your response only came to me on Thursday 1/12/2022, taking a further 2 days. By this time, the water pipe leak had been running for 7 days, had damaged ceilings in 2 rooms, undercut wall tiles and damaged a section of skirting.

By contrast, when I called your competitor, they arrived within an hour, inspected the job within 30 minutes, gave me an acceptable quote within 10 minutes, started stripping the old pipes immediately, while the second team member went to buy the needed material, and did the whole job from callout to completion in 6 hours. This was for exactly the same scope of work as I requested from Burgess Plumbing. Even if I accepted your excessive quote, your response time would have been in excess of 5 days.

I supply this information with the intent that you re-evaluate where your company is heading with regards to price and customer service. In my opinion you are no longer meeting market expectations on either.

I intend to copy this letter to your superiors and the market.

Regards Clive le Roux