Is @SamHoustonApts Listening?
Sometimes it’s hard to decide how much personal information to put online. There’s the obvious things like addresses and real birth dates, but what if those things are required to explain something. Either way, I’m going to leave certain parties rather vague in this post.
This year I had the opportunity to live with some friends at an apartment complex called The Arbors. It had some great amenities such as a communal spa, large swimming pool, and gym. The complex houses a lot of people in their twenties, though my friends (also in their twenties) don’t know any of their neighbours.
Heck, the only reason I know some of my neighbours at my home is because I went to school with them. I have decided I’m going to make friends with as many neighbours as I can when I move in to apartments and houses of my own. I digress.
Regardless of how nice the Arbors complex is, they don’t have any recycling facilities. I find that very ridiculous! Every other city I traveled to when I was in America and Canada had recycling.
They also have large grassy areas between buildings where residents can walk their dogs. The Arbors even supplies plastic bag dispensers next to trash cans for dog owners to pick up their animals’ feces. I don’t think I saw a single dog owner do this, and thus I never walked on the grassy areas. This needs to be policed better! The only time the excrement is removed from the grass is when the maintenance employees ride over it with their ride-on mowers. Seriously.
Those are the only issues I had with the Arbors complex. Until I left.
My friends live in a large apartment with several bedrooms. A couple of the bedrooms were vacant for about six months. The previous renters of those rooms had inflicted some extensive damage to the doors and walls of those rooms which needed to be fixed before new room mates could move in. The Arbors wouldn’t fix these damages until summer when there’s an influx of new residents. My friends didn’t mind because they had a huge apartment to themselves and didn’t have to pay for those other rooms.
Over the summer the other rooms were fixed and new residents were found for those rooms. Another cool thing that the Arbors does is build a profile for every resident and tries to match up new residents with current ones. This helps room mates coexist and hopefully become friends. That is, if residents fill in their profile correctly.
I’m going to struggle right now to not going in to the situation with my friends’ new room mates. In short, the profiles of the new room mates didn’t match my friends’ profiles at all, yet everyone gets along nicely. Oh, but my friends wanted to move in to the two larger rooms in the apartment. The Arbors manager had promised them the rooms once they were repaired. Though, when it came time to move the new room mates in, two of them got the larger rooms while my friends got stuck in their smaller room. My friends had lived there the longest and they deserved it. When my friends disputed it with the manager he just said ‘It wasn’t in writing …’. That’s some poor customer service right there!
Again, since I left it seems to be one thing after another. The hot water doesn’t work and the front desk at the Arbors says it could be a few days before they can have a look at it. It ended up getting fixed within 10 hours. The Internet connection fails and the Arbors tells my friends to call the Internet provider (Suddenlink) because the complex doesn’t handle any of the Internet connections.
My friends called Suddenlink and troubleshooted with them. It took a while so my friends had to call back at a later time. When they did, Suddenlink said they don’t even see the Arbors complex as a client on their system.
Now whether or not all of these issues were the fault of the Arbors complex, they should have the courage to fix a problem when they see it. I know that there’s hundreds (if not thousands) of people in the complex, but major companies have to handle millions of peoples’ issues and complaints. If the Arbors can’t handle some simple customer service, then hire more people to do so.
I imagine an apartment complex to be like a hotel. Someone or somebody on call 24/7. Apparently this is not the case: after 7pm on weekdays you get an answering machine.
The Arbors have a Twitter account for promoting parties and events. It used to be @ArborsSHSU, but they recently changed it to @SamHoustonApts. I don’t want to be self-centered, but the only reason I can justify that they changed to a longer username is because of this tweet I posted about them. That’s like Hilton changing their company name to something else because lots of people badmouth Paris Hilton.
If we use my self-centered way of thinking, then @SamHoustonApts must be listening. Are they listening now?
It’s time to step up and care about your residents before they read this and think about going to the apartment complex down the road.
