Last night our boiler would not shut up.
Despite not having the heating on nor any demand
from the hot water, the fan whirred and whirred, keeping me and, most
importantly, our house guest awake. Anyway, having finally given up on it
switching itself off , I dragged myself from my pit and turned it off at the
wall and resolved to get it serviced ASAP.
It wasn't that long
ago that if I was thinking about getting the boiler serviced I would simply call
British Gas. After all I knew people who worked for British Gas, they went to
school with me, they lived just around the corner and British Gas seemed to
spell out trust, reliability and service. So this morning Rachel called me and
told me that there was a great '£50 to service your boiler' offer from British
Gas, I would have expected myself to think "great, that's fine, I know I can
trust the 'Gas Man' (as they used to be called) to be honest with me and get the
old one working properly if humanly possible."
The thing is, I
didn't. In fact I suggested that we potentially paid more to use someone local
- or even a larger outfit such as Pimlico Plumbers (who ain't cheap), rather
than the trusty 'Gas Man'. I don't really know when my perception changed, its
not so much the high prices (and their profits), I think its more the fact that
they seem to lack knowledgeable people - their call centre is awful and every
interaction seems to be a sales opportunity. So I guess that by calling British
Gas, I feel they are less likely to give me good old fashioned advice and more
likely to tell me that I should buy a new boiler - simply because it helps the
engineer meets their sales targets.
The greatest problem
for British Gas is that I have no proof on which to base this perception but it
has coloured my judgement to such an extent that I simply don't trust the
brand. Shame really, British Gas' strongest card was the fact that you would be
happy to trust their advice - "The boiler is playing up, I'd better see what the
Gas man has to say." - yet in its desire to create a modern, sales focused
company, it has managed to lose its best opportunity for qualified sales
leads.
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