Just Another Customer

The whole story, up front please!

I will not accept anything other than forthright, honest communications from the companies wanting to business with me.

Grade: D

Company:
Long Fence

Event:
Getting a Quote for Windows

Location:
Online / Phone

In the year or so that we have had our house, we must have received a thousand mailers from home improvement companies. One of the most persistent has been Long Fence. They claim some reasonable discounts in their mailings and their signs are ubiquitous in the Washington D.C. area, so I though I would check out their Web site when looking for some info on a replacement sliding door.

After looking quickly at the site and not finding even a hint of an actual price, I clicked on one of their prominent “Request an In-home Estimate” buttons. I put in a request for a quote and, since we were considering replacing our windows as well, also indicated that we would like a quote for replacement windows.

Within 2 hrs (on a Sunday afternoon!), I got a call from Long Fence wanting to set up a date and time for a visit. A quick and painless call that said they would confirm the day before - that’s it. Four days later (the day before the visit), I got the confirmation call from Long Fence in which the customer service representative informed me that both my wife and I must be present for an 1 1/2-2 hr presentation in order to get the estimate. This was certainly news to me. After a bit of back and forth with the customer rep, I informed her that we were no longer interested in their services.

Certainly, I understand that the company has to be leery of people looking to take advantage of their free estimates and that there are some valid reasons for wanting both my wife and I present; however trying to sneak this fact in under the radar was unacceptable. It is not good practice to try to trick your potential customers at any part of the relationship. If they had been up front about this, perhaps I would have made a little more effort to be flexible and could have found some way to keep our two daughters occupied for a few hours. But by either some very poor customer service in the first call or some very bad standard practices, my willingness to engage with Long fence quickly came to an end.