I recently terminated the relationship with the man who’s serviced our pool for a number of years.

For quite awhile now, I haven’t been happy with the service we’ve gotten, including the fact that the hot tub never seems to really be clean. But it was always good enough and in the overall scheme of things, it was not bad enough warrant the time and effort to go out and find someone else.

Finally I decided enough was enough. I found another company that offers a pool service that’s more complete than what I’m paying for now (and not always getting) and less costly, too. The next step was to call the current guy and go through the inevitable dance of telling him we’re canceling service, then have him try to convince us why we should stay.

Except that’s not what happened. When I told him we’d decided to use someone else, he said, “Well you must be unhappy because the hot tub isn’t getting cleaned, but it’s too much effort for me to do this regularly.”

Huh? You know your service isn’t up to snuff, but you’re telling the customer it’s too much work to do what you’ve agreed on a regular basis?  Even worse, you wait until the customer leaves to have this discussion. Instead of telling me that you can’t deliver the level of service requested and perhaps lowering the rate, you just keep on keeping on at a lower level of quality and hope no one notices or says anything.

In this day and age, one would think businesses with customers would do everything they can to try and hang on to them. To do otherwise, is just insane.

If you’ve got a customer that isn’t getting the top quality service they expect, what are you doing to change that? Will you wait till they go to a competitor?  Or will you do something to fix the problem and the relationship while you still can?

My pool guy’s last words, on the bottom of the final bill, “We’ve enjoyed providing service all these years and are sorry to lose your pool.” Hmm. Too bad he didn’t understand it’s better to be safe than sorry.