An extra mile

Since we moved in we have noticed that our refrigerator seems to run about seventy five percent of the time and it makes some pretty loud background noise. Such as you kind of have to shout to the person in the kitchen to be heard. When it stops you realize how loud it's been by the sudden silence that descends upon the apartment. Viewing this as a problem (and not wanting to see a power bill that reflected a 'fridge that ran most of the day) I submitted a work request to have it fixed.

The repair guy for the apartment came out and looked at it and kind of shrugged and said, "It's old, they all sound like this." Which, to some extent I understand. It's probably ten years old and cheap fridge tech back then isn't what cheap fridge tech is today. After he fixed a few other problems he left and I got to thinking about the problem.

We work from home and are here a lot of the time. If we worked somewhere else I am not sure we would notice it as we would be gone all day, and then when we came home we'd probably have some TV on ,or music, or be talking to each other and just assume "that's how it sounded". We work here, in silence a lot of the time though and a low grade rumble is really quite a bit of a bother. So I wrote the management an email saying that I understand the machine is old and a lot of people probably have this problem but they aren't around as much as we are, etc etc, and could we see about handling this as a special case to get something done about it?

An hour later my phone rings and I pick it up. It's the complex manager apologizing up one end and down the other for the repair guy's response and she understand's that the machine's are old and she's working to get extra budget so they can replace units like this and she says she'll make sure there is a follow up with us tomorrow and she'll see about getting something done about it and she'll call me in the afternoon to make sure something was done. And she wanted to know if there was anything else she could do to help.

I think I kind of stammered a "no, everything else has been fine, we've been communicating problems as we find them and you have been fixing them." type answer.

I cannot tell you how impressed I was. First of all that she would look up my phone number and call me before the day was out about the issue, and that they hold their repair guys to a higher standard, and maybe even empower them to seek out different solutions when the situation warrants. And also that the management actually cares what I happen to think. I am so impressed I don't know if I will ever live in another apartment complex not managed by AMLI. Our friend's were right when they highly suggested this place as a good place to live. This is a gold-star example of customer service. They've cemented my loyalty.


~B.
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