The worst direct sales customer.....

...that's me :)

Hubby is now looking again into the viability of us having solar panels installed.
So when an unsolicited call came last Friday he told them he was interested but busy and to ring again Monday afternoon....they rang again Monday morning in the middle of our coffee morning grrrr, anyway Hubby made an appointment for someone to call round Tuesday at 2pm.

Not long after an early Tuesday call to confirm the appointment I answered another call from a different person within the same company. She checked that I was Mrs.X and asked to speak to Mr.X but I said he wasn't available so she said "Well I'm phoning as he suddenly cancelled your 10am appointment because YOU were taken into hospital and I need to rebook an appointment with him......but as you are obviously not in hospital can you tell me why he was just making an excuse? As you must realise we have already sent out our salesman and paid him!"

I pointed out to this person that I know for a fact that my husband wouldn't lie to her or anyone else and if I had been rushed to hospital this morning phoning us shortly after he cancelled would be the most inappropriate time to expect him to rebook. I suggested she had contacted the wrong customer and that I would check with my husband and he would ring her back. She kept insisting that she would ring us and eventually she gave me her name and phone number. I wasn't warming to this company!  While I was passing on the conversation to Hubby she phoned back, giggling and apologising that she did have the wrong customer and to ignore our previous phonecall and Gary is still coming at 2pm.

So Gary arrived and we sat down and he started his patter with a list of what he was going to tell us later so Hubby stopped him and explained that we already knew quite a bit and that's when Gary said that maybe I wouldn't know quite as much as my husband so he would explain more for my benefit.  I then stopped him and said what we were really interested in was the price and if it was way above what we were willing to pay we could save his time by saying so early.....it took him more than 2 hours before he would give us an actual price, and yes it was way above what we were willing to pay. He used all the common direct sales tactics of product placement, government incentives, discounts for taking part in their feedback scheme and further discounts for signing up quickly. We finally got rid of him and said he would have an answer before the end of the week.

Hubby had met and chatted to another company while he was at the Suffolk Show, so he rang them and Karl arrived this afternoon.  His first question to us was how much did we know already and then he told us the price answered all our questions and actually went outside to measure up and then suggest the best system and size to suit our needs. He wasn't even here long enough for us to offer him a cup of tea!

Karl's solution was half the cost of Gary's and included as much product and with the same guarantees! Bit of a no brainer!
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