I’ve been offline for the last few days since we have been moving into our Queens apartment. Given the somewhat (yeah, right) obsessive personality that I have, I wasn’t okay until everything was unpacked and in its own place. I still have to figure out the curtains, wall coverings and other little miscellaneous things – but that will be “Stage 2”. (Have I mentioned that I don’t want to move again for AT LEAST another three years?)
Anyway, I wanted to share how we chose our moving company. First of all, it’s amazing to me that we actually paid someone to move us. In the past, we’ve just had moving parties and had a bunch of friends help us move followed by thank you dinner parties at our new place. I guess that we’re growing up though. Actually, the main reason that we paid professionals is that we have all of this amazing equipment “on loan”, because we’re one of Panasonic’s Living in HD families. I think that my husband would have had a heart attack (not literally) if something would have happened to his beloved flat screen television. No need to ruin friendships over “stuff”, so that’s why we decided to get a moving company.
We asked for referrals from personal friends first. We were so shocked when one of our more frugal friends mentioned that he had paid a thousand dollars to have a moving company move him. Then, I sent out a tweet on Twitter asking for recommendations. The names of two moving companies kept coming up. Since my husband was handling finding the moving company, I gave him the list of all the recommendations so that he could go to work. Since one of the popular names was the company that our “frugal friend” had used, we were leaning towards using them.
Now here’s the lesson for companies: Customer Service Trumps Social Media AND Personal References! We contacted the company and they had someone come over and do a walk-through of our home in order to set the rate for the move. We liked the concept of a set rate / no surprises and we really wanted to go with them. However, they lost our business because we had to chase after them to get their final quote. A man from their company did a walk-through of our apartment on Saturday and said that he would let us know the rate on Monday. On Monday, after we emailed him and called him, he said that he had crunched the numbers but he had to wait in order to get a supervisor to approve the quote. He would call us back by the end of the day / Tuesday morning at the latest. By Tuesday evening, my husband called again after not receiving a response to his earlier email. The quote was $910. I could be wrong, but in my opinion, if someone’s looking to pay you almost $1,000 for a service, they should not be the one who has to keep emailing and calling you in order to give you their money – especially in this economy and in stressful, time-sensitive occasions (like moving!).
While company “A” was dragging their feet, Oz Movers earned our business. My husband had emailed them as a comparison and they promptly emailed him back. Once we told them what needed to be moved, they sent over an estimate. (Their current rate is $135/hour for four movers.) From start to finish, they were a pleasure to work with. They followed up with us by phone and email to make sure that everything was all set for the move. They arrived 15 minutes early on the day of the move and worked steadily the whole time. They were so friendly and helpful that we were happy to pay the fee. (When they learned that we were using another service, Company “A” had warned us that we would end up paying much more with hourly rate movers. They were right. We ended up paying more – $5 more. We were more than happy to pay an extra $5 in order to use a company that was proactive and obviously valued our business!)
