Dear Mr. Ferreira,
It was disappointing yet expected to receive your negative review after we spoke yesterday.
We were particularly disappointed to hear that you have interpreted our actions and communications with you in such a negative way. We find that one of the largest gripes that our clients have is the lack of communication from gardeners and landscapers with themselves. We are often told that prospective clients may phone anything between 5 and 10 landscapers before they even get one person to answer the phone. Following that the majority do not even turn up for the appointment and those that do seldom even send a written quote. The reason that many of our clients proceed with ourselves is that we maintain a high level of communication with them, from when they enquire through to when they are having the work completed.
We feel that our actions yesterday were proactive, with the intention of keeping you fully informed of the Director, Mr Harker, running late. This was through no fault of his own. Unfortunately, the weather yesterday was dreadful, as we are sure you can remember, and this caused significant traffic issues. In addition to this a previous customer (you were his fourth appointment that morning) had taken up a significant portion time speaking to Mr Harker about their requirements.
As soon as we realised that Mr Harker was running late, we calculated the travel time and expected duration of the appointment that Mr Harker was on and had given you an estimated time of arrival of 11.15am. We appreciate that this was a whole hour later than when you had initially booked in and was not ideal but could not be helped due to the reason stated above.
The next appointment, however, ended up being very short and as soon as Mr Harker was on the move again, we contacted him for an estimated arrival time for your appointment. This ended up being only 15mins later than your first appointment which we thought you would be delighted about. Unfortunately, that was not the case. When we contacted you to inform you that Mr Harker would actually only be 15 minutes later than your original appointment slot, you dictated that Mr Harker had to arrive at 10.15am or 11.15am. Mr Harker was still 15 minutes from your property and the time was already 10.15am so it was unrealistic to expect Mr Harker to arrive for 10.15am. It was also unrealistic to expect Mr Harker to wait outside your property for 45 minutes to wait for you. Therefore, we sadly informed you that we could not oblige you as he had a full calendar and we thought it best to cancel the visit and refund you.
You then reneged on your demand and said that 10.30am would be ok. Unfortunately, by this point, Mr Harker had driven past your junction on the M6 and would have had a round trip of 17 miles to get back to Junction 16. This would have further delayed the remainder of the appointments he had booked in for the rest of the day, therefore we confirmed that we would still cancel the site visit and refund you.
We feel that we communicated openly with you from the moment that we were aware that Mr Harker would be late, providing you with up to the moment information as to when Mr Harker would arrive with you. Despite our regular communication, you were rude to our Client Managers and were deliberately obstructive when Mr Harker was confirmed as on his way to you. Therefore, we did not offer you an alternative appointment and refunded your site visit fee immediately.
It is always disappointing when something like this happens, thankfully the majority of our clients are lovely people and understand that appointment times need to have a certain degree of flexibility.
We wish you all the best in finding a suitable landscape gardener.
