Mercedes Benz Financial Services | WhaleTales Blog by Chris von Ulmenstein

The Sweet Service Award goes to the inaugural Cape Town Festival of Beer, which started yesterday and runs at Hamilton’s Rugby Club in Green Point until Saturday, and to Shafeeka Anthony of Rabbit in a Hat Communications, the PR agency that organised the media invitations, in particular. She is one of the most organised persons in this position I have ever dealt with, sending follow-up notes every day without being pushy, and generously made vouchers for food and beer available for the opening day. Twenty breweries and 40 beer brands are exhibiting, and many are micro-breweries (there are 21 micro-breweries in South Africa). I was particularly interested in the Darling Brew stand, because it had a large background banner saying SLOWBEER – it is brewed for 4 weeks instead of 2 days, which is the norm for commercial beers.

The Sour Service Service Award goes to Mercedes Benz Financial Services, for their attempt to deceive their customers, by having sent out the following sms earlier this week: Your good standing with MBFS qualifies you for a skip payment. Call 0861daimler & quote ref Festive 2010 at least 10 days before your payment due date. T & C apply”. When one calls, they ask for which month one wishes to skip the payment. Then the crunch question : how would one like to repay the ‘skipping’ – by having one month of repayment added on, or repayment by spreading it over the rest of the repayment term! Earlier this year Mercedes Benz was very generous in allowing one month payment free, communicated in the same way by sms. It sounded like another generous offer from the company, but it wasn’t, and it felt as if one was being misled and taken for a ride.

The WhaleTales Sweet & Sour Service Awards are presented every Friday on the WhaleTales blog. Nominations for the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be sent to Chris von Ulmenstein at info@whalecottage.com. Past winners of the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be read on the Friday posts of this blog, and in the WhaleTales newsletters on the www.whalecottage.com website.

The Sweet Service Award goes to Mercedes Benz Financial Services, for extending their Easter promotion, entailing one month free repayment if one called a number on receiving an SMS, into May. The customer did not know that MBFS stood for Mercedes Benz Financial Services, and that the SMS was not spam, and was to be taken seriously. They agreed that customers may have missed out on the promotion by not understanding the origin of the SMS, and therefore granted the extension of the promotion, a welcome saving of a month’s repayment!

The Sour Service Award goes to Seeff Properties, for creating high expectations amongst private property owners in Host Cities around the country, and in Cape Town in particular, using soccer hero Gary Bailey as their spokesperson. The owner of an apartment in Green Point, Jenny Stephens, listed her property with Seeff on Regent Road in Sea Point last year, and was prescribed as to the additional facilities that would need to be provided to make the apartment marketable for a World Cup rental. She did not hear from the rental agent again for four months, until she wrote last month to say that whilst the demand for such accommodation is high in Johannesburg, “Less visitors will base themselves in Cape Town. In fact, the demand at this stage is for shorter periods, on average five to seven days”. The agent also blamed the cancellation of MATCH room nights, as well as the high costs of match and airline tickets for the lower demand for accommodation, and wrote that the rates they had previously promised were no longer achievable. The agency therefore recommended a rental rate decrease to Mrs Stephens. Seeff is said to be taking 25 % commission on the rental bookings, sounding almost as greedy as MATCH! As Mrs Stephens could no longer wait for Seeff to rent out her property, she extended the lease with existing tenants.