Western Roofing Specialists installed a roof for me that looks pretty good. I did have issues with the salesmen. They told me that they would be here on a certain day to install my roof and this message ended up getting mixed up between many workers. The whole process ended up taking up five weeks. There were about 10-15 workers on the job and a couple of them decided to hang off of my basketball hoop, causing damage to it. Although I'm satisfied with the roof itself, the workers didn't clean up the area after the job. It generally could have been a better experience.
RESPONSE FROM Western Roofing Specialists:
We are very sorry that our customer feels his experience with us was not to his satisfaction. We would like to address his issues here.
First, once a roof is under contract, we are all very eager to get started as soon as possible. Our customer believed that the salesman gave him a specific start date; however, as roofing is outside work that depends on many different people and the weather to all come together, our contracts state that all start times are tentative. All of our salesmen know that they cannot promise specific dates. Even date ranges are subject to weather conditions and crew availability, at the least, and cannot be contractually promised. As luck would have it, we did have a week or so of sub-freezing temperatures in December that kept our crews off the roofs. Of course, when it warms up and the snow melts, the crews still have to finish the jobs that were interrupted before they can move on to new jobs. The fact that we were able to start this roof within a month of receiving the signed contract into the office shows that it was not delayed much. We are often 6 to 8 weeks out (or more) on tentative start times after hail storms, even without bad weather holding up the schedule. Also, in reviewing the notes in the file, it appears that much of the pre-contract and gutter installation delays were due to our salesman and the gutter installers having difficulty receiving return phone calls and emails from our customer. So, for now, we believe we did not promise a specific start date, nor were there any unaccountable delays on our part. Our customer claimed to us that he has email evidence of a promised start date. If he permits us to review the email thread between him and our salesman, we will find out for sure whether his complaint is valid. If so, we will certainly issue an apology.
Second, as for our crew's clean-up work, our Senior Job Supervisor inspects the crews' work after each job and checking for quality of clean-up is a big part of that. The crew will not be paid until the job is cleaned up well. Our SJS reported that he did not find debris on the roof or in the gutters and that very few nails were missed in the yard. He policed around the house with a powerful magnet and found only a few missed nails. As nails are small and yards are big, there will always be a few left here and there. That just can't be helped. The crew absolutely cleaned up after the job and actually did a very good job of it. We aren't sure why our customer feels they did no clean up.
Third, our salesman took pictures of the house and roof the day he first inspected for damage. These pictures were loaded into our electronic file on the date he took them. As the program we use, Acculynx, is a subscription software, we are unable to alter notes and time stamps after they have been posted. A picture of the basketball hoop was uploaded and it clearly shows that the hoop was damaged before our salesman ever arrived at our customer's house. If our customer would like to see the photo, we would be most happy to provide it. We know that we get used to our home environments to the point of forgetting where the flaws exist. It is entirely possible that our customer paid no attention to the hoop prior to the roof work that he did not know it was already damaged. We would like to think that is the case. We would very much like to think that our customer would not try to cheat us out of repairs we are not responsible for, so we will give him the benefit of the doubt here.
Our customer had the benefit of working with a terrific salesman and one of the best, most professional roofing crew in town. We are glad he is satisfied with the roof itself. After all, that is the bottom line.
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