Good Service -- rare, but still around

I crank up fairly easily when I experience poor service, or idiots in the call centers, or extremely brain-dead ways of doing things. Since poor service, call center idiots and brain-deadery seems to be the norm these days, you can bet I'm cranked up quite a lot.

So it is a real treat when I get to actually compliment a company for providing good service. In the case of Maricopa Water Processing Systems, the company that provides service for Kinetico© brand water softeners, I did not get just good service. I got excellent service.

My softener is eight years old. Kinetico warranties their products for ten -- parts and labor, with a service call charge. Over the past 6-9 months my water has been growing steadily harder. Sporadically I'd get soft water, but most of the time it felt scaley and hard, like little crystals of calcium were growing on my skin as I showered, or lodging in my clothing as it was laundered. The system would cycle fairly often as well.

The first really good thing was that when I called them, I got an actual human being. A real voice, that responded realistically to my questions. She connected me to the service department where I spoke with a woman named Gwen who took down my information and set me up for a service call right then and there.

This process used to be the norm. It's so NOT the norm now, that it's noteworthy.

It took two service calls to finally pinpoint the cause. The softener system itself was fine, which made it tough to debug. Ryan, the tech who solved the problem was punctual, knowledgeable, non-intrusive, thorough. He didn't stop at the first problem he found -- he continued looking and testing and probing each possible problem area, found two problems -- one was a leaky bypass valve and the other was salt built up and lodged beneath a screen at the bottom of the brine tank because we had used crystalized salt rather than salt pellets -- and fixed them. I paid for only one service call.

I wish, oh how I wish that all companies could manage to go back to this way of doing business.