We own a Murray Franklyn home. Murray Franklyn is one of the biggest middle tier builders in the North West. They have great architects and deliver a good, middle tier home, most not without their flaws. Customer service, honesty and communication: not their strong suit.

Let’s take a personal experience to learn a bit about the future of customer service.

First Rule: Communicate.

When I send mail to Murray Franklyn’s customer service I am usually met with silence. For weeks, sometimes I just give up.  After several requests I finally had my crawl space inspected by their supervisor in the field. He took notes. I received no word of their opinion nor of any action to be taken. I’m back to reminding them again that this isn’t yet resolved. Current count, 4 e-mails, no response.

Every customer service organization should send, at minimum, an automated receipt response. Even the county sent me an automated receipt response to let me know they received my complaint about some recent Murray Franklyn work done to our neighborhood’s gutters and sidewalks. I might not have sent that note if Murray Franklyn was talking to me about my complaints. But I give the country credit for at least getting back to me.

Second Rule: Don’t Snow Your Customers

We purchased a home with landscaping included. Note to new home buyers, if a builder, this one in particular, says they have given you X dollars of landscaping included in the sale price of your home, ask them to provide twice as much in cash so you can fix the landscaping once they leave. Never let them (as we naively did) have their landscaper come remedy the problem you think you have (in our case it was really poor lawn drainage – which we still have 5 and a half years later because the builder had the landscaper lay sod on top of clay with a dusting of topsoil. Result, a water barrier that traps water between the sod and the clay.) We paid $700 to have the landscaper come in with some equipment and pluck holes in the lawn. No improvement. (BTW, also check to see if the landscaping is being maintained, ours wasn’t. We had a huge number of crane fly holes where the giant insects escape their pupa stage from our lawn. They claim all of this was just routine or that they had done the work. Wrong. I ended up spending thousands in the front of the house to have all of my soil dug up and replace 8 inches down with good soil – that should have been done in the first place – rock and clay is not a good bed for grass. Lovely front of the home now. Backyard not really functional as it still sloshes in July and August. Again, beware of any Murray Franklyn offer of included landscaping – ask for remediation money upfront.  If you get in early enough, spec and supervise the landscaping yourself, that may get you what you want, but you really have to be specific and monitor it. We had to upgrade sprinklers as well, as watering was completely inadequate for the “included” landscaping – some parts weren’t even watered. As with our current gutter and sidewalk repairs, it appears that even in good times Murray Franklyn went with low bidders rather than quality workmanship.

Third Rule: Your Customer Determine the definition of satisfaction.

Drainage under our home is still an issue. They have moved rocks and dug trenches deeper, but they have not put in drainage nor installed any kind of sump pump. We have asked for both. This has gone on since our home inspection over 5 years ago. They won’t step up to their poor grading issues, poor workmanship under the home nor to the mis-thinking of encasing the front of our down-slopped home with the curb as a barrier to drainage. We have no place for water to run off of our front lawn so water just kind of backs up across the property. They should install French drains all along the front of our home and underneath it, or install a sump pump. They really should. Still waiting for the next discussion. Still.

Forth Rule: Build a community

Unlike many who claim to build communities, home builders do actually build communities. Building a community should be a positive thing. In our case, the community has built itself, and one of its common themes is the regular, and consistent negative reflection on Murray Franklyn around rules 1-4. No retailer should ever desire to have their community rally around their poor customer service and perceived lack of respect and void of communication. Building a community should be a positive experience for the retailer and for the community.

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Don’t let your retailer, builder or manufacturer off the hook. For the kind of money we spend for homes, the builder needs to be held accountable for the end-to-end experience until the customer is satisfied. Satisfaction in tough cases can only happen through communication and negotiation. Not talking only increases the fuel. Thus, I have brought the county and the city into the dialog, and posted this blog to document the issues.

A perceived lack of respect for customers is a daunting issue for an organization to overcome. Respect is hard to regain once it is lost, and with the Internet, the past, once documented, spreads the word to future buyers.

The fall in housing prices we are experiencing did not come just from banking—it also came from builders inflating their wares to a market sold on owning a home as an American right, a sale often regarded by the builder as yet another property movement, not as an experience for the new homeowner – any experience that was positive was predicated on getting out of the way so that hopefully any warranty would expire before something went wrong. Well, that isn’t the way to run a business and keep customers coming back to you, or providing good word of mouth in the community. Follow the four rules above if you are a builder or retailer and you’ll do well, and if you are a consumer, watch you back and don’t let yourself be bullied or sweet talked into doing something just because the effort to get it right seems to take up too much energy. That’s what the just-get-by attitude is all about. We can just-get-by and we’ll save money because the consumer will think that fighting takes too much time and too much energy.

It’s your home, you deserve to have it delivered to you in a condition you are satisfied with, and you deserve a builder who respects that right.

I hope you find this little diatribe helpful as you look for a home, and if you already have a home that still needs work before you are satisfied, I hope this blog encourages you to keep asking for what you deserve.