Morgan Friedman: Hey everyone, welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories. Very excited to have the one and only Aleks Krylov with me today. How are you doing, Aleks?

Aleks Krylov: I’m doing well. It’s a privilege to be here. Thanks for inviting me to join the show.

Morgan Friedman: We had a great prep talk a few weeks ago, and I’m very excited to hear about your insane story. My calm tea is in hand, so with this calmness ready, tell us about the storm.

Aleks Krylov: I am actually completely opposite. I’m drinking iced coffee, and this is not my first cup. So I might be coming across a little wired, but that’s normally my state of being once I’m up. There’s a lot of running around during the morning and afternoon, but it is what it is.

Thank you again for inviting me and inviting us as an organization to join and share the story. I think, in retrospect, this was a great learning experience for us as an organization.

That’s why I wanted to have this perhaps somewhat academic discussion, where we talk about some of the learning experiences and internalize them better by talking about them.

Obviously, we’re going to keep the identities confidential.

The essence and the crux of the story is that, last year, around October or November, we were contacted by a customer in Passaic County, New Jersey. We operate Stern Gutters and Roofing in Northern New Jersey, and the homeowner was a retired lady who had a small, single-story home. She wanted to install gutter protection.

We priced the job to literally get it done and get it secured. There was very little margin for returns or margin for error, and we landed the job because we were very competitive.

We completed the gutter guard installation sometime during the first week of November 2024.

The reason I’m being so specific about the dates is because it took us a very, very long time to arrive at a resolution. That’s why I want to be very clear about the dates from the very beginning of the story.

We came out, completed the job, and it took approximately five or six hours to get it done. We wrapped up and left.

As part of our normal operating procedure, before we come out and schedule customers, we collect a deposit. Once the job is complete, according to the terms and conditions that every single customer signs, we run their credit card to settle the outstanding balance.

That’s what we did.

Literally within a few days, we started receiving an email and then a series of phone calls.

“Hey, your technician created a lot of damage on my property. You guys have to come out and fix it.”

In those instances, I ask all our team members to bring me into the conversation right away. I want to handle this type of customer complaint personally, so I got involved very early on.

Ultimately, the homeowner was raising a number of grievances, including that we had broken a lamp on her patio. She showed us a picture of a loosely hanging lamp on her back porch. She also showed us pictures of chipped paint underneath the gutters.

She said, “You guys did that while you were climbing up there.”

I took that information in and went back to the technician who had done the work. He denied that this was the case.

He was never doing a lot of work in the back porch area. He didn’t have access to that area. He also explained that, logically, it was physically impossible.

We lean ladders on the gutters, and we use various tools to protect the gutters from any damage that the ladders would cause. The ladder stabilizers go over the gutter and lean on the roof above it.

There was simply no way for us to cause chipped paint underneath the gutters.

Morgan Friedman: I want to make a quick comment. This is a great story building up to see what happens.

Something I’ve seen in my experience is that it’s incredible to me how often people who make up lies to try to get an extra ten cents from a contractor don’t do their research or think about it.

They make claims that are literally impossible, like in this case.

What I think is happening is the following: People who want to make up lies so they can get some extra ten cents from a contractor are basically looking for a shortcut to make some quick, easy money.

Because they’re looking for a quick shortcut, they’re taking shortcuts in their stories. They’re not thinking about, “How do I make my story credible and believable and strong?”

They just make up literally impossible nonsense.

Aleks Krylov: I think there’s a lot to it. We can go into the psychology of what drives people when they’re initiating these types of claims and discuss their character, but I think you’re right. It happens more often than it should.

Since our inception, we’ve serviced more than 10,000 customers. We recently sent out invoice number 1,000, and we’ve only had two horror stories like this.

I want to have faith in humanity. The large majority of people out there are good, solid people with integrity and a great amount of conscientiousness.

But, of course, there are exceptions to the rule.

Morgan Friedman: Absolutely. In any case, continue with the story.

Aleks Krylov: We responded to the homeowner by saying, “Look, we will investigate further.”

I went back and reviewed the pictures that we had. Unfortunately, we did not have a lot of pictures from before or during the installation stage.

The logical arguments I was laying out—that we could not have damaged her paint or her lamp—weren’t really getting us anywhere.

About a week into this discussion, the homeowner discovered that we had charged her credit card for the balance of the installation.

The tone of the discussion then turned significantly more aggressive, upset, and demanding.

Her original position had been, “You guys have to come out, paint my gutters, and fix the lamp.” She even provided the name of the paint and the brand of the lamp that she wanted.

But after she realized that we had charged her credit card, she started demanding a complete refund, regardless of the fact that we had completed the installation and the gutter guards were already implemented on her gutters.

They’re not easy to take off. It’s a permanent fixture of her property now.

That was the new stance and the new position.

By that point, we were already in the middle of December. We had been having these dialogues for four or five weeks.

At some point, I pointed out the terms and conditions that they had accepted when they hired us and paid the deposit.

Those terms said that, as a contractor, we would come out and fix whatever workmanship issues they might have. Only after all reasonable attempts to correct the workmanship issues had been exhausted could we start having a conversation about a refund.

At some point, the husband also got involved. It became a three-way conversation between me, the husband, and the wife.

The husband started insisting that when we came out, it had to be a very senior installer—not just a regular installer.

They also insisted that the visit take place on a Saturday because the husband needed to be there. He worked regular hours and could only accommodate Saturdays.

The situation kept dragging on.

Ultimately, I proposed, “Look, you don’t need to be there. Here’s a list of the four or five items that you would like us to address. We will come to the property, execute on that, and take before-and-after pictures.”

I pretty much conceded to everything they wanted. I just wanted to close the conflict out, resolve it, and move on.

This was not a big project. It was just taking a lot of my time, and there were other customers I wanted to attend to.

I thought it might be easier to send the technician out there, get the job done, and perhaps that would lead to a resolution.

Then additional layers of complexity started emerging.

They said the senior person needed to come on a Saturday. The husband wanted to be there. They wanted us to provide all sorts of insurance forms that we had never needed for the original installation.

All of a sudden, those things became part of the request.

We were not able to accommodate everything immediately. Then the holidays hit, and by the end of January, we were still not seeing the light of day.

At that point, I received a request from our bank that a dispute had been filed against the charge.

I was invited by the bank to submit justification for why their position in disputing the charge was not appropriate.

I submitted the paperwork. We pulled the pictures, the terms and conditions, and everything else.

Ultimately, four or five weeks later, we won the dispute on the credit card charge.

After that, they went silent.

I nevertheless left the door open for us to come out and address the issues they had originally raised—the paint, the lamp, and everything else.

Then, sometime in early April, the husband reached out.

Morgan Friedman: So we’re six months into this saga now. Now I see why the timeline was important. It reappeared six months later.

Aleks Krylov: Exactly.

The husband reached out and said, “I’m giving you enough heads-up. I will be home on Saturday, the week after Memorial Day.”

June 3rd, I think, was the date.

I responded almost immediately, saying, “Bill, I don’t have visibility into what our schedule is going to be.”

But I said that, subject to further confirmation, we would put him on the calendar and take care of it.

And we did.

I bought the extra paint that they wanted. Along the way, they actually dropped the demand to fix the lamp, so it was only a matter of painting the gutters.

We came out, painted the gutters, and did some additional tune-up work that they asked us to do while we were on site.

I was happy to accommodate them.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, them dropping the demand to paint the lamp is more evidence that it was literally impossible for it to have been your fault.

They knew it was impossible, which is why they didn’t push it.

Aleks Krylov: Look, at that point, six months into the dispute, I didn’t care.

I just wanted them to get to the point where they acknowledged that we had done the work, that they had raised the issues, and that we had fixed the concerns they had.

That would close the loop on us fulfilling our obligations to them as a client.

We did all that. The visit went without any wrinkles.

On June 3rd, we finally closed a project that was supposed to have been completed on November 3rd, 2024—almost nine months earlier.

So that was the horror story.

During the initial complaints and concerns they were raising, I was approaching this very emotionally because I felt like we were being taken advantage of.

One of the biggest things I took away from the experience was that we had poor documentation.

We had a loose policy of taking a few pictures before, during, and after the installation.

After that experience, I became very insistent that every single team member take at least 25 or 30 pictures during the estimate phase, as well as a lot of pictures during and after the final product.

Right now, our standard customer file contains 150 to 200 pictures, versus maybe a dozen before that experience.

We are much more rigorous about documenting the site before we arrive, and it has helped us.

Morgan Friedman: There’s an interesting teenage online slang phrase—at least from 10 or 15 years ago—called FPF: “photo for proof.”

People would say, “I have a girlfriend in Canada.”

And the response would be, “FPF. I won’t believe it until I see a photo.”

It’s interesting how, in the real world, simply taking photos—which is so easy now that every human being has a camera—can go such a long way toward proving the state of things before and after, and what did or didn’t happen.

Aleks Krylov: Absolutely.

Quite frankly, this policy is irrelevant to us in 99% of cases. But, as I said, out of thousands of customers, this is the second case where a customer attempted to bring up concerns in exchange for a discount on the final price.

Ultimately, she made a claim that we had broken some fixtures on her property.

My response to her was, “Well, look. During the initial estimate, I took some pictures. This is from six weeks ago. That damage was already there before we arrived on site.”

My philosophy is that, as long as this is our standard operating procedure, we document pretty much what we do and where we operate.

It serves as protection. We don’t have to spend extra time thinking about it, and hopefully we’ll never need to use it.

But in those rare occasions when we do, the documentation is there.

Morgan Friedman: If I take off my Client Horror Stories hat and put on my digital marketer hat, what I would say is that a policy of always taking lots of photos gives you so much material for social media.

If you don’t have one already, you might want to create a process to sort through all these photos every week or every day, and take the best ones to use as before-and-after photos of your work.

Aleks Krylov: That’s a great observation.

Literally about two months ago, we started doing this systematically.

Before that, we were taking photos as a regular course of business and putting them online as demonstrations of what we do.

Actually, we weren’t. We were just documenting things for the sake of documenting, but you’re absolutely right. There is a side benefit to that.

Morgan Friedman: If I take off my digital marketer hat and put on my client-success hat, it might also be interesting to send the photos to customers before the work and then send them the photos afterward.

Here’s what we did before, and here’s what we did after.

That might be interesting for a few reasons.

First, for the one percent of clients who are really difficult, if they see from the first second that you have shared and organized evidence of the condition of things beforehand, it reduces the chance that they’ll want to file claims and cause problems.

Another interesting aspect of doing that is—and this is going to sound weird—I have this instinct that getting photos of before and after makes it feel more real.

You don’t get more real than physical work with your hands, but there’s something about the formality of, “Here’s the post-action report. Here are all the photos and documentation.”

It’s like, “Wow, this really happened.”

It might make the clients like you even more.

Aleks Krylov: This is a very insightful conversation and observation.

As a homeowner, unless you’re willing to climb 30 or 40 feet in the air on ladders, you normally don’t have easy access to the gutters to observe what is actually going on.

You only look at the gutters from the ground, from below.

We submit before-and-after pictures and a visual report on every single job we do. We take the shots from the top to give homeowners extra insight and the comfort that we did the job properly.

There’s another element. We have an in-house bonus system in place. In order for our guys to get their bonuses, they need to produce pictures showing that the gutters have the appropriate slope, that the screws are in the appropriate places, that there is a drip edge installed, and so on.

There are internal procedural items that we want the guys to document when they complete the job in order to qualify for their performance bonuses.

The third element is something that we are yet to roll out a little more aggressively, but my expectation is to do so in the coming weeks.

In the fall, gutter cleaning becomes very important here in New Jersey. We are in close proximity to New York, and a lot of our clients live in New Jersey but work in New York. They’re commuters, so they spend their time in the city and are not home to hold our hands and monitor the gutter cleaning that we do.

We have started getting a lot of traction with select homeowners who love the fact that they don’t have to be home.

We can come, do the cleaning, and provide them with a picture report showing the before and after.

They have the comfort that the job was completed. They have confirmation that the job was done. They know they are paying for something that literally created value.

We want to capitalize on this because serving busy professionals in this particular area of New Jersey could give us a leg up. It would create more value for homeowners while also advancing our business.

Your observation about documenting and presenting the results to homeowners is a very neat way of maintaining contact with customers and perhaps continuing to build the relationship.

Let me make one more observation.

When we do cleanings, at the very end of the photo report, we send about a page or a page and a half of various maintenance and gutter-support recommendations, including the frequency with which the gutters need to be cleaned.

We remind people, “Don’t forget to clean your gutters three or four times a year.”

Normally, people don’t realize that this is how frequently they need to service their gutters.

It’s an opportunity for us to emphasize that. We can show them how messy their gutters were before we showed up and what they look like after we’re done.

If they don’t follow this schedule, the likelihood is that they’re going to find their gutters in the same messy state as in the before pictures.

The before-and-after pictures are very impactful.

I’ll take a pause here. I think I digressed quite a bit on the picture side.

Morgan Friedman: I love this digression because I have maybe 80 or 85 Client Horror Stories episodes now, and I try to always get at least one new lesson in every episode.

It gets harder as time goes on, but I usually manage to find one.

The interesting issue that came up here, which has never come up before, is the following.

Often, we talk about documentation, and a handful of times we’ve talked about documentation in the form of photos.

But we had never really dived into the power of, as long as you’re doing all this documentation, the other really good uses for it.

As long as you’re taking the pictures, you can make your clients even happier.

If you have these best practices for working professionally, what else can you create as a consequence that can be reused?

Aleks Krylov: I cannot agree with you more.

Taking us back to that same story, I think that, however negative that horror story was at the moment, in retrospect there were quite a lot of insightful learnings from that experience.

They helped us operate more efficiently, deliver much better customer service, streamline our operations, document our steps, and give customers more information about their own homes.

Morgan Friedman: I love that.

I think a very powerful approach is to treat every problem as a learning opportunity.

But not just in the sense of, “Let’s hold hands and see how we can be nicer and better.”

Instead, ask, “How do we create or change processes as a result?”

I think this is something you did very well.

A disaster happens, and now you have this rigorous photo policy.

Aleks Krylov: Since we’re going through the takeaways, there were a few others that led to adjustments in our operating procedures.

Now, we insist that all our crews engage with the customer before leaving the site.

They can’t just disappear after completing the work. They have to knock on the door once they’re finished, walk the customer through the work that has been done, and tell them that the digital photo report is coming.

They give the customer an opportunity to ask questions.

I found that this creates an extra step in terms of engagement. If there are any concerns, the customer can raise them while the technician is still there, and perhaps some of the issues can be corrected while they’re still on site.

Morgan Friedman: There’s another reason why knocking on the door to talk to the customer for five minutes is a great strategy.

Have you ever noticed this pattern? Really nice people, when they go online anonymously, suddenly become completely different.

When the other person on the other side is just a random company, random bureaucracy, bots, or automated systems, people have no hesitation about filing a chargeback or dispute and becoming angry.

People become trolls when they’re anonymous online.

But by putting a human face to it—“Okay, this is a nice guy. He came over. He tried.”—it feels to me that people become a lot less likely to cause problems.

Aleks Krylov: There is some aspect to that. I think there are shades of gray to the observation.

But you’re right. It’s much harder to be rude to a person when there is a name-to-the-face connection versus being distant or rude when there’s just a person online or a name on the screen.

Morgan Friedman: Exactly.

If you want to be even more cynical and intensive about it, maybe you could improve customer happiness and lower the chance of problems by doing more than just a walkthrough.

Maybe you could shake their hands or give them a hug.

I don’t know if you’ve ever read about how TGI Fridays or some of these big chain restaurants train their waiters.

They often have policies where, when the waiter takes the order, they bend down and look at the customer at eye level.

People tend to leave more tips and have higher customer satisfaction when the waiter is talking to them at eye level.

There are zillions of these tiny techniques that make people have a better experience.

It might be interesting to approach those last five minutes from that same perspective.

Aleks Krylov: This is actually a very keen observation. I haven’t thought of this angle, but I think it’s very smart.

Morgan Friedman: I have to interrupt you before you finish.

Earlier, I had two ideas that I thought were great, and you were like, “Yeah, we already thought of that one.”

I’ve been challenging myself to come up with a good idea for you guys that you hadn’t previously thought of.

So here you go. We’re going to figure out how to incorporate it into our operations.

Aleks Krylov: Ultimately, we are in the client and customer-service business.

This may not be as intimate with a customer because, look, we’re Stern Gutters. We’re here to work on your roof and your gutters. We’ll talk to you when we’re done, and that’s the extent of our interaction with customers while we’re on the job site.

There is some distance, and sometimes elevation, involved.

But I don’t think there’s going to be any downside to being extra personal when wrapping up the job, creating, and reinforcing the personal rapport.

I remember during the COVID years how all the service workers—Uber drivers, food-delivery people, and others—were serving the community. They were risking their lives by providing essential services because the safer alternative would have been to stay home.

Translating that over to roofing and gutter operations, our guys are 20 or 30 feet in the air fixing roofs and gutters. They’re taking risks with their safety, livelihoods, and lives.

Personalizing the experience reminds homeowners that it’s not just bots out there on their roofs doing the work. These are real people doing the work and putting their lives at risk.

Morgan Friedman: Absolutely.

Aleks Krylov: I think this would go a long way toward building the relationship and increasing customer satisfaction.

It’s not a conveyor-belt production process where robots are doing the work. These are real people going out of their way to deliver a custom solution to homeowners.

Morgan Friedman: I want to close on that, but I also want to share one more element.

I like your personal recommendations, but my personal bias is toward what we can do in a more documented, regimented, hard-element way in our operations to avoid these types of problems.

I like the idea that building personal rapport would help mitigate some situations as well, but I’m interested in the operational side.

Aleks Krylov: My wife, when she learned about this story, said I should have been more empathetic to the homeowner when I was interacting with her.

I’m not your fuzzy, soft, empathetic guy. I’m more of a, “Let’s get stuff done” person.

That’s where my biases come out. I’d rather be operationally efficient than say, “Let’s do a hug and build a relationship from there.”

But the one thing we incorporated as a result of this experience is that we ask homeowners to give us a written sign-off on the project.

They confirm that they don’t have any concerns or issues with the installation and that they are not aware of any damage to their property.

Once they sign, we document it and upload it to our CRM system. It becomes part of the record of servicing their home.

That was one of the operational adjustments we made as a result of the experience.

Morgan Friedman: These are a whole bunch of great process improvements for avoiding disasters and making clients love you.

The two sides are often the same coin.

It’s not always one big thing that you do differently. It’s lots of little optimizations taken together.

I love what you’ve done and the ideas we’ve discussed here.

Aleks Krylov: It was a great learning experience.

However emotionally charged it was early in the process, I’m looking at it as a great learning experience. I’m very grateful that it took place.

I wish we didn’t have to go through it, but given all the lessons we derived, that’s even harder to let go of the story.

Morgan Friedman: I love it.

Aleks, there have been so many great lessons and such an interesting conversation. This has been great, and it’s been fun getting to know you.

Thank you for coming on the show.

Aleks Krylov: Thanks for having me. It was great to meet you, spend time with you, and I hope some of your listeners will derive valuable lessons from our scars and bruises.

Morgan Friedman: And for all you listeners, thank you for watching.

If you’ve made it to the end, we hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have.

Until next time.