Predatory Pricing Model - Dishwasher Door Spring Repair
I was charged $150 for a service man to come to my house and tell me what I told him, that my dishwasher door spring was broken and needed to be replaced.
Prior to booking the service, I was informed that there would be a $150 call-out cost, but if I chose to have them do the repair, it would be applied to my project quote, but what was actually meant is that it would be added to the project quote, which came in just shy of $380 to install a $75 part with an estimated time of under an hour.
When the technician came to install the part that he had diagnosed it was very clear he did not examine the part that was broken at all since he was unable to pull the dishwasher out (not his fault, just showed he didnt actually properly diagnose the problem which I was charged $150 for).
If he had of done his job in the first place he would have at least not wasted more of my tenants time when he came back out.
I was frustrated and found your advertising very misleading. If you had of been upfront with me and told me it was going to be $380 to repair my dishwasher, I would not have had your company come out. Please be upfront with your customers as this is clearly the minimum repair cost given you ADD not apply the callout cost to your repairs.
I did follow-up with the owner on this, and his response was, "It is what it is".
I am sure this company does fine work, and appreciated their timely response, but their cost quoting felt very predatory, so please be weary before calling for your callout.
- Approximate cost of services:
- $150.00
- Company Response
Hello again Scott,
He's missing ALOT of what was said and taking things out of context here.
Yes sometimes we get bad parts, less than 1% of the time and we don't open the boxes or examine every single part which a tech can have hundreds on board, it's frustrating especially for us to eat the return trip cost but it happens and the other solutions we've found to combat this were not cost effective for anyone either. So we do return free of charge which I think is fair.
I actually had a conversation with Scott on the phone and read our call out statement to him which every customer gets in their email and went over other ways it could be written, as I've done before with other customers to see how we can improve it. Eventually landed on what it is now with roughly a complaint rate of 1-3000 customers which is FAR better than it was 7 years ago where it was 1-50 customers, however Scott said he couldn't find a better way to put it and just continued on with were scamming people. However listed in review responses, on my website and in our terms of service it says it multiple times how our call out works, that we are not the cheapest option there are many fly by night companies that pop up and we don't compete with them as they rotate out of business almost yearly. We are priced fairly and don't work for free which is the basis of what Scott wanted. He wants us to work for free for most of our time spent on a call ( which is driving, pick up's and basically a good tech spends way more time driving than actually working on appliances, about 80% of my day is driving, if we didn't get paid for all time associated with a call honestly no one would do this job, items in the shop get charged out as the customer does all the driving so its just time on project, but no one brings stuff down to the shop anymore) however we won't and we wouldn't go into business with a customer who does want this.
That all being said we do have "cheaper" options for the DIY people who run into snags, if you call us with the part #s we can direct quote you over the phone, just you take the liability of being wrong as opposed to us, we do have myself that will answer customer questions if they request it to try and avoid these issues, however you need to ask the questions to find the answers you need, 99% of our customers just want to call in, get someone out and that's it, so we don't go over every single option we have available for every scenario, you'll have to use some questions if you fishing for something different.Scotss calls and emails threatening to post this fishing for free service lead to the " it is what it is" commen, and go ahead and post your review. So here we are.
Again we apply the call out to a quote once we figure out what the issue is. The quote generated applies all aspects of the job and it says this in our call out statement. Scott just wanted it to be free as in no charge at all, which we would never do.
If anyone comes up with a better way to write our call out statement I'm willing to change it immediately, however it's written in there 2 different ways for different ways that people interpret things. It's been very successful.