Response from Ned Stevens Gutter Cleaning
Customer purchased an Angie's List deal to clean out the insides of the gutters and downspouts. When we went out to clean the system, the system was sealed shut by a no-clog cover system. We can't remove the cover system or clean underneath it, but we have to redeem the deal because we showed up and the people have to get paid, so we did a gutter cover cleaning, which involves us blowing off the roof and the tops of the covers, clearing the area where the water gains access through the cover. That is the limit of what we could do without (1) voiding their warranty (2) ruining their covers (since we cannot reinstall those types of covers if they come off). Weeks after the cleaning, Atlanta has an extremely heavy and long rain. We get an angry call from the customer's husband on a Sunday at 6:30 PM asking us to open our business and call in staff to go to his home because water is coming into his basement. He claimed that we didn't clean the gutters, which I was giving him the benefit of the doubt for. While he was yelling at me, he never once said that he has a cover system, which would have obviously overflowed in this type of rain. I finally calm him down and tell him I'll have people out first thing the next day. I even send two crews of 5 people to his home, but as soon as we arrive, we see the covers, and know there is nothing we can do. We given him a recommendation and price for removing the covers, which is several hundred dollars, but he believes that by buying a gutter cleaning deal, which is meant to clean open gutters, he believes we should have removed every cover on his home and cleaned his system and put the covers back, which is something that would have taken an entire day and cost well over $2000 to uninstall and reinstall all the covers, and not be covered by a $79 deal. After we showed him the covers and the issues he had, the crew left. A day later, we get an email from the customer, which was odd and disturbing. It used a lot of fowl language, and had a few racist comments about the staff that came out to the home. It was a rare instance where I had to tell a customer we would never service them under any circumstances. I'm sorry about the issue they had with their system, but it was nothing we caused, and nothing we could have fixed without their approval and payment.