National Builder Supply Complaints?

I have written, in previous blogs, that I subscribe to a statistics/metering service entitled “Sitemeter”. This service allows me to know many things. I know how many folks visit my site daily, where they came from or what question they asked that got them to me, their physical location, what internet service they use, how many pages of my blog they read, how long they stayed, and what they exit from or to. This enables me to keep up with what interests my readers the most, what questions they are looking for answers to and where they are finding out about my blog. The reason we set this blog up originally was to meet the needs of the DIY public with interesting articles and information and frankly to occupy my days of being homebound. The most popular blog, thus far as been the series on “what’s that smell?” followed in close second by my series on ADA and handicap access bathrooms and fixtures and then in third place “how to build a bathroom in your basement”. These three bring a constant flow of traffic to the site and I am grateful that I have been able to provide this info to the public and strive to find more subjects that people want to read about so if something comes to mind leave me a comment or drop me an email.
That said the purpose of today’s blog is further answer another frequent inquiry that I have addressed several times but still comes up. People will go to Google and ask “Are there any complaints about National Builder Supply?”. In the past the answer was simple….NO. I have followed this answer up with at least two blogs containing compliment letters and several other blogs about Marcus Morgan (NBS owner) and his dedication to customer service. You can view some these at the following links:

http://nationalbuildersupply.blogspot.com/2009/06/last-word-on-complaints-and-compliments.html

http://nationalbuildersupply.blogspot.com/2009/06/last-word-on-complaints-and-compliments.html

http://nationalbuildersupply.blogspot.com/2009/06/sitemeter-resultswhy-buy-from-nbs.html

No complaints of any sort, no Better Business Bureau issues, no nasty letters to the customer service department…NOTHING. Then back on July 13th their record was slightly tarnished by a misunderstanding and assumption by a customer that got so upset that he wrote a complaint about NBS at “My3Cents.com”. He priced a certain faucet all over the internet found NBS to have the best price and placed an automated order for it late on a Saturday night. The automated computer system at NBS began the order processing found that the inventory was incorrect and that the item wasn’t available. Unlike most internet/online merchants, NBS actually stocks their merchandise and fills their own orders. Their inventory consists of 100,000+ individual items with a large cash value and regardless of how up to date and automated your inventory system is it still subject to human error. Finding the item to be unavailable the automated system sent out an email informing the customer of this and offering an upgrade to a similar more expensive product at no additional charge, to offer a discount on the product or a future purchase, the opportunity to cancel the order, or at the very least to notify the customer that the shipping date would be changed. All of this occurring within about 3 hours of the original order. Unfortunately the customer determined that this could not be happening in the middle of the night on a weekend, decided that it was a devious trick to try to up sell him on something else. Up to that point NBS was in the right and the customer was mistaken. But when he angrily called the customer service department to inform them of his decision to cancel the order he perceived a less than courteous response from the agent and says he was hung up on. This was inappropriate. I make it a habit, because of the question being asked of me so often, to monitor Google and other search engines on a regular basis looking for these types of problems and I found this one on the following Monday morning and reported it immediately to Marcus. Marcus dealt with the employee so that wouldn’t happen again and personally called the customer to apologize and although he had purchased a replacement the customer was offered a generous discount on a future purchase. Although the customer is now happy and satisfied that his complaint was dealt with the complaint still remains on the internet and probably will for posterity. So if you are reading this today looking for complaints about National Building Supply and in case you haven’t seen that one I am honest enough to call your attention to it and Marcus wants everyone to know that as is expressed in his customer service policy on his website, they continue to struggle to give every customer the best products at the best price with the best service of any online merchant. The fact that you can only find my comments and that one complaint should speak for itself.