george bailey

GOS Heating have been giving customer excellence in and around the Preston area and the North West for over 50 years and it is not very often that we reply to online reviews; However, in Mr George Bailey’s case, we decided not only to make an exception, we were also happy to depart from our usual customer service excellence and chose not to quote or do any work for him. Why is that you all ask? Let me tell you!

It’s the start of the colder months and our customers quite rightly want our immediate attention to ensure their families stay safe and warm; We are still catching up after 7 months of Covid and we always try our hardest to meet our customers expectations. Even though we have recruited heavily recently, we do occasionally make mistakes but we will always do our best to put things right for our customers.

Mr Baileys original enquiry was originally with Peter (our fantastic Managing Director) and an appointment was made to visit at 1pm on 20/10/20. Unfortunately, Peter wasn’t available so the appointment was passed to Alex (our Managing Director’s extremely capable son). Alex understood the appointment to be ‘after 1pm’ and arrived at 2pm during what is a really busy period. Mr Bailey made no comment to Alex about his lateness so Alex didn’t know he had been late until the Trustpilot review arrived which was within an hour of us telling him today (22/10/20) that we preferred not to quote for the work. Who would apologise for being late if you didn’t know you were late? It’s a small point but one easily taken out of context when penned by a now very bitter Mr Bailey….and just about the face mask bit - Alex knocked on the front door and backed away with his face covering in his hand ready to put on before he entered the house but didn’t get chance to do so before Mr Bailey snapped discourteously at him on the doorstep. As an aside, but just to bring events into context, Mrs Baileys face mask snapped soon after Alex entered the house so she decided not to wear one during the entire visit – are you seeing a trend here? There’s more…….

During the visit to quote for work, Mr Bailey explained to Alex that he had contracted 4 previous plumbers (who he called imbeciles) to look at his heating system quotation. Strangely enough, you start to build a picture of who and what you’re dealing with when 1 man thinks 4 independent tradesmen are imbeciles and is willing to tell someone who is a gas and heating engineer who could soon be the 5th imbecile! There’s more – Mr Bailey is the gift that keeps on giving….

As I said earlier, we visited on the 20/10/20 at 2pm to survey for quotation. Now this is quite a large project which always involves significant pricing involving many suppliers and trades to deliver an accurate quotation. Mr Bailey decided that between 330pm on the 20th when Alex left his house and 1230pm on the 21st (6 normal working hours) was sufficient time for the quotation to be prepared. He rang again today at midday with an attitude at which point we decided that we would rather not do business with Mr Bailey. We actually told Mr Bailey that we were just too busy to undertake this volume of work because we were too courteous to tell him that we didn’t want to work for him – that was, of course, until he posted his Trustpilot review!

Here’s the summary…we know that some customers can be very demanding and we expect that, but we expect to be treated with courtesy and respect. You will simply never please people like Mr Bailey so to all you local ‘imbecile’ plumbers (but also heating engineers and gas engineers) watch out for this person. Oh!...and watch what you write about on Trustpilot.