My name is Mike Klein.
I am the President of Kayak Pools Midwest. I have been with Kayak since March of 1986 and very proud of that fact.
When I started with Kayak, because of the quality of our pool, I wanted to structure our company on the mindset that, if we just educate the customer and give them the facts, most people would choose the Kayak Award Winning Pool over all the rest.
We have focused on our reputation and customer satisfaction from day one and until Covid, is was literally impeccable.
When Covid hit, it changed everyone’s’ world. Needless to say it changed the way most businesses were able to operate, including ours.
With everyone on lockdown, the demand for swimming pools skyrocketed. With the high demand for swimming pools and the Covid limitations our spotless record started to blemish. Until Covid we had an impeccable record with an A+ rating with the BBB and the Attorney Generals in all of the states that we do business in. During Covid we were plagued with manufacturing delays, one of the wettest Springs in years, and we were understaffed which hurt our ability to perform as we had for decades. At the same time we had crews in the field who came down with Covid, we lost numerous employees, service techs, and installers because with the Federal Stimulus Program, they were making the same if not more on unemployment.
Our ability to install pools on time and to provide good customer service was affected.
I would like to add, most of our customers (around 94-95%) understood our situation and although disappointed, were patient. The other 5-6% of our customers started becoming threatening and were completely unwilling to be understanding about the issues. Our customer complaint percent went up to around 6-7%. From the norm over the years of 2-3%.
As you are well aware, we weren’t the only business severely affected by Covid. There were hundreds of thousands of businesses that were also negatively affected. Customer complaints skyrocketed for most businesses during Covid including ours.
As things started to go back to normal in 2022 we devoted all of our energy to getting back to normal. The first priority was to go through each customer complaint and try to resolve any and all issues amicably. We gave full refunds to over 85 customers last year and we truly tried to do the right thing. The only customers we played hardball with were the ones who would call and scream profanities, disrespect our staff, and or blatantly give us false information. In addition to the refunds, in order to give us time to catch up, we intentionally slowed marketing way down so as to give us time to resolve all these issues.
We at Kayak, take full responsibility for our issues during Covid and we are happy to report that we are pretty much back to normal.
Unfortunately we are still dealing with the residual affects of a small percentage of disgruntled customers who have saturated social media with negative information. This negativity makes it very hard for myself and my team when we are truly trying to do the right thing.
All we ask is that each customer focus on our pre-Covid track record and what we are now currently doing to restore our business operations back to normal.
The Kayak pool is one of the best pools in existence. All I ask is that you don’t let a few disgruntled customers cheat you and your family out of this amazing pool.
Since 1958, when we sold our first Kayak Pool, we have tens of thousands of “happy” Kayak pool owners that far outweigh the numbers of the few complaints. The complaints that we had during Covid were lack of ability to provide good customer service and our lack of ability to install on time along with manufacturing supply issues which affected so many companies The one extremely positive constant is that Kayak pool owners absolutely love their Kayak pools no matter what happened.
I want to thank you for listening to our side of the story. We truly value every prospective and every existing customer.
Best Regards,
Mike Klein
President
