I have an upcoming project that will be starting very soon, and for this particular project, the homeowners decided that they wanted to support one of their friends by engaging them to supply the tiles for their home.
My boss, the project manager and I are not happy with this arrangement because getting an external supplier in is always a risk since we never know how their working style is like and if we can actually work with them properly, that and also the fact that we won't be making any profit from this scope of work since it's the homeowner's own contact, all that potential commission went into the the very generous discount that was extended to them.
During the early stages, I did visit their friend's tile shop with the homeowners, and my goal for them at that time was just to take a look at what they had, and then still stick with the tiles that we had already shortlisted from Hafary since we had spend hours the week before choosing the tiles from there. Unfortunately, their friend was around that day and he started to do his salesman pitch about why his items are better and blah blah blah, and because he is friends with my homeowners, they were convinced and decided to get from that friend.
I was then assigned a Sales Associate from the company to act as my contact because the homeowners definitely won't be able to co-ordinate this aspect of the works by themselves. (Which fucking sucks because just to reiterate, we are not getting any sort of incentive or commission from the supplier, in fact, they had essentially "stole" that portion of our business from us, but we still have to do the co-ordination work with them, it sucks)
The contact person is their friend's son, whom I shall just refer to as Lew, and that guy is just very unresponsive. He takes forever to reply to my messages, has the habit of not acknowledging my messages and just leaves me on "read" most of the time when I ask him questions, and now that the homeowners have decided to get their products from his side, that unresponsiveness is just unacceptable because we have a timeline to follow, and I cannot wait 3 days for you to get back to me about a good time to meet on site.
I dropped him a text to tell him I will open a group chat with my boss and project manager so we can discuss the details further.
He leaves me on "read"
The chat is created, I introduced everyone to each other, my boss then greets Lew and ask him for a good date and time to meet. No response, I go check my own message to see the status and notice that Lew hadn't even opened the chat yet.
A day passes by and Lew still did not reply to my boss's request in the group chat, I go check the status of the introduction message I had send and he still hadn't read it yet, which means he didn't even open the group chat.
The next day, I drop another message in the group chat to follow up on my boss's request, thinking this will get Lew to open the group chat and acknowledge our messages.
No response.
The earlier messages I send weren't blue ticked at all because Lew didn't even bother to open the group chat.
The homeowner (husband) then messages us in their own group chat to check if we had gotten in touch with Lew, I directly told him that we have attempted to text Lew, even tried to call him, but he was uncontactable. I was honestly really frustrated at this point and the homeowner decided to reach out to their friend to ask what was happening.
Later that night, Lew finally replied (no doubt after his Dad relayed our complaints to him) and he told me he was currently on Reservist so he wasn't able to check on his phone as much, he ask when we are planning to meet and I told him we are planning to meet next week, but since he will still be in Reservist, it would be best if he could send someone else instead.
The message was read, and I was then left on read.... YET AGAIN!
Anyways, I told the homeowner about what happened this morning, that I had finally gotten a response but that my request to Lew was left on read with no acknowledgement on his end and no updates about whether he will get someone to assist us. I then requested for him (the homeowner) to get his friend (the supplier) to link us up with another sales person instead, which he did requested his friend for, so now we are just waiting for the other sales person to get in touch with us.
The homeowner then send a message to us saying his friend is a reliable businessman.
Ermmm... okay?
Great that you have such faith in your friend, but the way the son is handling this whole situation is really proving otherwise. Doesn't acknowledgement messages and takes forever to reply to those messages is really not a sign of a reliable businessman, if he was really that reliable, he would have attached someone who was more competent to the project.
An example of acknowledging a text message would be a simple text like.
"Noted with thanks."
... or even just giving me a thumbs up emoji would be fine. Lew literally just leaves me on read.
Being on Reservist also really does not excuse the lack of response as well, I think if you are going to be in a customer facing position, it's common sense to at least update in your Whatsapp status that you are away when you are away, and also include the date that you will be back.
His status was just left as "Available".
If you know you are going for Reservist and you have projects on hand that will require attention, please for fuck sake, pass it to someone to take it over temporarily. I feel like this is the responsible thing to do for the customers and also just common fucking sense for a sales person.
Even if you don't do any of the above, which you really should, at least have the fucking decency to reply my initial message that I had send 3 days ago, that you have clearly read, with a simple message like....
"Hi. I am currently away on Reservist from this date to this date, so I may be unresponsive during this period."
... you literally blue ticked yourself by opening my message, and then don't have the basic common sense as a sales person to leave me a message like that to update me? My expectation of Lew was already quite low when I found out he was the son of the owner, because I used to be like him, I used to work for my Dad and I honestly didn't treat it as proper work experience, to me. I was essentially just projecting my personal experience working for my Dad on Lew and I don't really think I am that far off to say that he is quite incompetent at his job, which makes me wonder if he has any real working experience beside working for his Dad.
That being said, I do know of friends who do move on to take over their Dad's business and I have the utmost respect for them because they do take their job very seriously, and they are definitely not Lew.
Update :
Lew has just replied to my previous message...
14 fucking hours later.
Props to him for not having to take 3 days this time around I guess. He is asking me for more information about our site visit so he can let his colleague know...
I don't need you to let your colleague know, I don't need you to be our proxy because that is going to take 4 times as long!
I message him
~14 hours later~
He reads it.
~14 hours later~
He sends it to his colleague.
~14 hours later~
His colleague replies to him.
~14 hours later~
He updates me of his colleague's response.
I replied to that message within 10 minutes, thinking he will be able to reply me quickly since he was already looking at his phone, but it has been about 6 hours since and he hasn't even read my message yet.
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