I called these people and was able to reach a real person (it turned out to be the estimator) right away. In fact, he even made it out that morning. He was professional and knew what he was doing, as far as I was concerned. That's a good start!
I received a proposal in a reasonable time frame. In that email he states, "If you want to accept this estimate and move ahead with the project, simply fill out the "Acceptance of Proposal" and return it back to me. As soon as we receive your acceptance, we will contact you to schedule your work"
My response; "I am likely going to accept this proposal but because this job is part of a larger project with the garage, I need an idea of when it could be done"
This was his response: "In order to schedule, please sign the proposal and return back to me. Once I receive that, I will forward it to our office for scheduling. Right now, we are about 2-3 weeks out."
This is just unacceptable, mostly because this "estimator" likely could have just helped me by answering my question and working with his own company (which I eventually did in 20 seconds) to get me at least a ROUGH date. I am not committing to something in writing that ultimately could be 3 weeks....or 8 weeks...or more.out.
My response was "Let me check with another company. I'll let you know if we are going to go forward. The schedule is important to me and I would like a little commitment there."
NO REPLY FROM RAISE-RITE. This floored me. As a business owner myself, it's unbelievable that you are okay to lose a job because you are too lazy to make a phone call and talk to your own company.
I was determined to find someone else that would do the job and DESERVED the business because they cared about it. The other two of the top three concrete leveling people in Wheaton showing on Google were typical home contractors - unresponsive.This is just the seedy underworld of home contractors, and you either do it yourself or roll the dice.
Based on this, I decided to try to salvage the project with Raise-Rite since I was now on my own. I called them, hoping to get someone who understands a customer, and was complexity surprised that they actually had people who could just say, "sure, let's see what we have", and schedule the job.
MORAL OF THE STORY- a seriously broken piece of the chain can cost you business. Raise-Rite was propped up in this case because there were people WORSE in the sales process.
Raise -Rite did a good job in the end, but when you have a process that makes people look for other options, you're really vulnerable. If you really can perform the job, as RR can do, it is an absolute crime to act indifferent, allowing opportunities to simply go away. when the rest of the organization know what they are doing and can accomplish their mission. read more
