Tales from the Shop: You're Not Even My Customer Edition

[peach2play]

We did a brake job on a Ford F250. Nicest gentlemen from one of the northern states who was referred to use by his shop at home since we are in the same warranty network. He pays, takes his truck home and all is golden right?

Primrose receives a phone call from an auto shop in northern state asking for a manager. I pick up the phone, and it's the guys home mechanic calling to say that we over charged for labor. Que the scratching record as I do not have a relationship with this guy, no idea who he is, but hey, if we made a mistake, I'd rather get it fixed for the customer.

I look up the estimate, then open our labor tool to see what happened. Well, low and behold, we did make a mistake on labor; we quoted a price for a dually F250 instead of a regular one. Primrose did the estimate, and the tool is a little difficult to read sometimes, plus she's only been in the auto repair business for two months. No excuse, we messed up, and I'm kinda glad he caught it.

However, when I told him we did make the mistake, and I showed our labor price should have been 1.9 hours (instead of the 3.7 quoted) he got very, very aggressive accusing me of trying to scam his customer out of money because he showed the labor as 1.1 hours. Now, there are different tools out there and sometimes the labor rates will be different. I kept asking him why he was being so aggressive, I was happy to refund the money and I was very sorry we made the mistake, but he would not let the .8 hours go. Insisting we over charge, and how could he trust that we could do things right in the future.

I was like WTF?!? You're not my customer and I'm still not sure why you're calling me. I asked him why he felt the need to call me instead of the nice customer, and he said he had known the guy since high school and was just looking out for his friend. I told him he didn't need to be so aggressive with me on the phone and I would take care of it with my actual customer.

I called the nice gentleman, and he hadn't even talked to his friend. He said not to worry about the mistake, we took his CC over the phone and refunded the money. He was fine with the 1.9 hrs of labor and all was well again.

[raudf]

There's watching out for your friend and then there's being a creeper. I think this "friend" has crossed the line, when the NC didn't even talk to him about it. I'm afraid if I had been NC, my friend would have been yank up hard, made to call and apologize for the whole attitude. I mean, it's not bad that he caught a mistake, but he should have talked to his friend, rather than YOU about it.

[peach2play]

I think part of the friend's problem is I'm female, and he thought he had been passed to me because the "man" of the shop wouldn't come to the phone. I'm the owner, so my shop manager would have handed me the phone anyway since I'm the one that handles the money. It also didn't help that my tech wrote the VIN down with a 13 instead of a B (really have to work on his hand writing lol) so I was frantically digging through the paper work for the written VIN so I could compare it to what I had typed in the system. I asked him to give me a moment while I located the proper VIN and I think that's when the call started to go down hill. That was about the time he started treating me like a two year old. I'm honestly surprised he didn't call me honey or darling or something like that.

[Cia]

You could call the company your customer's friend works at and let them know that he is a less than stellar person.