Speed of response never fails to impress

Over the weekend I was in the unfortunate position of having to call upon my British Gas Homeserve agreement as my boiler decided to go on the blink just as my family and I were settling down to watch a film, well my wife and I were settling down whilst our 1 year old was running riot around the lounge.

I called British Gas and explained the problem to them and asked for them to send an engineer out.  As we have a young child we were viewed as a priority fix and an engineer visit was booked for later in the day.

The lady on the phone was very efficient and left me in no doubt that an engineer would visit or if this became impossible for any reason they would let me know.

I was told to wait in between 1 and 6 and someone would come to fix the problem.  At 5.15 I thought I would ring back to confirm whether someone would come and was told by the attendant that there was no record of my earlier call.  Apparently I must have called British Ghost instead of British Gas.

After much complaining about this I rebooked the appointment for today between 8 and 6 (nice small window!!).  I asked for somebody to call me back to discuss my complaint in more detail but did not hold out much hope.

My wife and I then set about getting everything ready to go across to the Mother in Law and stay the night.  Anyone with a small baby will of course realise that getting ready to go overnight somewhere is akin to mobilising a small army.

Two strange things then happened in quick succession.  First of all the boiler roared back into life and then British Gas rang to say the engineer was about half an hour away.  I was pleasantly surprised by both events and duly cancelled the engineer from my original ghost call and called back the British Gas team to cancel my appointment for today.

All sorted I had totally forgotten about the complaint I had made and thought nothing more of it.  Within five minutes the phone rang again and it was once again British Gas, by this time I had communicated more with the Gas company than I do with some of my closest relatives.

This time however it was the supervisor from the call centre calling me back to a) offer her apologies for the inconvenience and then b) unsolicited by me she offered me a discount for three months on my bill for the Homeserve support.

I gratefully accepted both the apology and the gesture and congratulated the lady on her speed of response to resolve the complaint.  Being involved in the area of customer service training I asked if her speed of response was related to British gas policy or her own personal action.  She informed me that it was her own choice as she realised and understood the importance of getting back to complaints before they had time to escalate in the mind of the customer.

I was delighted with the service I had eventually received.  First of all they were prepared to send not one but seemingly two engineers on the same day to help us (a Sunday in a very busy time due to the weather).  Secondly however the lady who called me back did so within an hour, was suitably apologetic without being grovelling and she offered me an unrequested financial solution.

What could have been a disaster was turned into a triumph mainly due to the speed of response we received.  As this was the customer service supervisor’s choice to call back so quickly and not British Gas standard policy it just goes to show you that you can’t substitute good people and need to make sure that a) you recruit good people and b) once you have them you do everything in your power to keep them.

I am quite sure that the lady who called me back is one of British Gas’s biggest assets and I hope they realise this.