Someone forgot the abalone.
Michael Moore isn’t sure if the pebble applicator mistakenly overlooked putting crushed shell into the mix, or if Morehead Pools didn’t include it in the work order.
Either way, the pool didn’t sparkle the way it should have. The oversight hit the client harder than expected.
“He was heartbroken, like his dog had died,” recalls Moore, president of the Shreveport, La.-based firm.
Providing top-notch customer service is easy when everything goes right. But it takes a true professional to own up to mistakes and, in correcting them, go beyond expectations.
That’s precisely what Morehead Pools did.
It was a Friday when the newly constructed vessel was filling up — the all-important abalone noticeably absent. The devastated customer called Moore, who agreed to discuss it with him the following Monday.
Says Moore: “He had to stare at it all weekend.”
To his amazement, the client wasn’t at all demanding and may have even settled for a $500 reimbursement — the cost of the additive.
But that didn’t sit well with Moore.
He offered to drain the pool, chip out the plaster and redo the interior, this time with the added sparkle, at no cost to the customer.
The man was reluctant to take Moore up on the deal.
“I asked, ‘Is this going to be your forever home?’ And he said that it was,” Moore recalls. “I answered, ‘For the rest of your life you’re going to come out here, and you’re going to see this pool, and you’re going to remember how Morehead forgot the abalone. I can’t live with that and you don’t want to, right?’”
It was a $5,000 to $6,000 loss to the company, but Moore says the gesture bought him a customer for life.
“Now he has more abalone shell than he should. The thing sparkles at night,” Moore says with a laugh.
