Culligan Testimonial

Update: Tuesday March 24th (the next day)
Let the record show that my blog entry was discovered by a manager at Culligan this morning, named John. He called and spoke with Jennifer for quite a while about the two incidents. He was very professional and handled our problem rather well. John offered a lot of advice for Jennifer on what to look for when considering the used Water Softener (ie. Was it left out in the cold for an extended period of time? Things like that..). He did say that the water softener that we have now is out dated and he understood why the other "Culligan Man" that came to fix it couldn't fix it. Thank you, John!

Jennifer hadn't read this post yet and was astounded that I even posted the problem on my blog at all. I guess this shows that there is power in blogging. My plan worked... perfectly in this case. Had I not posted this entry, we would still be upset about yesterday's experience. However, as it stands now, John is going to get to the bottom of it in hopes that it doesn't happen to someone else in the future. Kudo's to John for finding my entry and handling it so fast... I guess I've done my duty as a consumer / blogger. :)

Anyway, I've updated the text below to remove some (not all) of my emotion about the two incidents. The facts are still there, but the anger has been "piped down" a bit.

Outcome: Culligan is OK by my book. :)

Original Post (minus the anger)
I'm not one to speak negatively of those (persons or companies) that don't deserve it. However, I think it's fair to post a review (good or bad) of our experiences with the Culligan company. We've had 2 incidents with them and both times they have ended with us being dissatisfied or (just recently) insulted.

Our first experience involved a Culligan man coming to our house to service our water softener. We waited for days for him to come out and fix it (no problem), but when he got here, he looked at it and told me he did not know how to work it... it was too old or something. I know it's old, that's why I called you. It's a Culligan water softener for crying out loud! Instead, he spent about an hour trying to sell us a new one. The reason I called him in the first place was to "fix" our water softener, not to sell us a new one. When he left, Jennifer and I were dumbfounded and didn't know what just happened. Nothing was accomplished at all and we were still left with a broken water softener. What the Culligan man didn't know is that I called him because I didn't want to bother my Uncle (who knows how to work on it). I called my Uncle after all and had him come and fix it.

Today, Jennifer calls to get information about a softener that she found in an advertisement. She wanted to know if it was going to be adequate for our needs and so forth. I listened to the conversation from Jennifer's' end, and Jennifer was extremely polite (one of the reasons I love her so much). However, the lady on the other end (the Culligan Rep) was very rude to her and treated Jennifer like she was an annoying nuisance. Jennifer had enough and finally said "Thank you. Good bye" and hung up. She was pretty fired up after she hung up the phone, and rightfully so. She told me how the lady was talking to her and how she was responding to Jennifer's questions. Unreal!

Here is a note for all people in the 'service' field:

Be Nice! Be Professional!

Here's what should have happened:

Incident #1: When the Culligan man came to our house to fix our water softener, he should stopped and realized that he was "the guy" to fix it. If he didn't know how to fix it, he should have called back to the Culligan headquarters (or whatever) and asked for assistance from someone that knew how my particular model worked. If nobody there could have fixed it, he should have found a way to fix it or referred me to someone that could fix it. The absolute last resort would have been to say "I don't know, good luck" and then walked away from it. Instead he turned to a "salesman" role...

Incident #2: When my wife calls you for information about your products, be nice to her and try to help her. Don't insult her and be mean to her. Who knows, her husband may be a blogger and he could post a negative testimonial about her experience with your company. It could even get indexed on a search engine and found one day. (?) *

* Updated: It worked! After only 1 hr, my post was the #1 search result on Google for "Culligan Testimonial"...