I am writing in response to complaint [redacted] from a [redacted] regarding recent move from [redacted], Ma to [redacted], MD. The facts are that Mr. [redacted] and family did not receive the move that he should have received or that we intended that he receive. After we loaded Mr. [redacted]'s...
furniture on our truck , we had two drivers become unavailable. This resulted in the delay that caused his delivery to take place on 7/9 instead of the 3rd as we had originally agreed. When we knew we could not meet this delivery date, it was explained that we would be responsible for reasonable lodging and half of his food bills for every night we were late. This information was passed on to Mr. [redacted]. We have since settled the inconvenience claim with Mr. [redacted] and paid him for damage at origin and the speaker that was damaged. Unfortunately when we have drivers that become unavailable at that time of year it can issues like this. Due to safety issues, it can be impossible to recover. Should you require additional information or have any further questions, please contact me at your earliest convenience.
Revdex.com: I have reviewed the response submitted by the business and have determined that the response does not satisfy or resolve my issues and/or concerns in reference to complaint # [redacted] We are utilizing their reply and responding therein. See below bold responses and comments. ThanksSorry for the delay in the response. Ms. [redacted] received a poor move. We had set up her shipment with North American Van Lines (Sterling is an Agent for them) to move them to [redacted], Ct. North American did not have a driver available to load this shipment. There not finding a driver may well be true but the issue started day one when Sterling's supposed employees showed up to pack after lunch with a foreman and his 3-4 kids in tow plus a few other employees. That foreman never went through the home with us or provided the promised valuable items form and thought he was done for the day after about 2 hours. He said his kids were visiting him from I believe upstate New York and he wanted to spend some of the day with them We then explained that there was a lot more packing than meets the eye since we had put away a lot in the basement to have our house shown for sale look better. At some point soon thereafter her went downstairs with his kids unbeknownst to us, while we were overseeing other packing, and he and his kids boxed up items that were not intended to ever be sent to Colorado and other items all thrown into boxes without any order or proper care. His kids had already boxed things incorrectly upstairs when they did our bookshelves with no regard to order or identifying boxes with books vs. boxes with our record collection.Then on Monday another foreman was in charge (one who had been at the house on Saturday) he began numbering boxes with stickers and trying to inventory after the fact what had already been packed. We are not sure why he used both green and white stickers that had the same numbers to label items but on the delivery end of the move this made things infinitely more difficult to track. His effort to properly inventory the already packed possessions was guess work at that point and this has led to tremendous issues with our insurance claim since several items and boxes are missing. He tried to catch up and as a result never really did a good job of inventorying our possessions. He also never had a valuable item list. When we asked him for it, he said he didn't have one and was surprised that on Saturday the other foreman ([redacted]??) with the kids, had not provided it to us and should have walked though our house allowing us to identify those items. When this crew came late on Monday and started with 3 helpers, only the foreman and one helper knew how to pack properly; the other two were not up to speed. One worker was over 300 lbs and had trouble breathing, walking and in general knowing what to do. The foreman was not very happy about having to pack things with the crew he had been given. Aside from the foreman, the other good worker had to leave to another job and he took his tools with him leaving the foreman and his crew without proper tools to disassemble beds and other items. It was this worker who damaged my speaker on the front end and it was never inventoried as damaged although he said he would be sure to take care of it. (Then he was gone). This speaker is no longer made and the repair is not possible without buying a used speaker for parts if one can find them or buying new speakers. The cost of the new equivalent speaker from Thiel is $7000 for a pair. Also by Tuesday the foreman was so tired of having to tell the large worker what and how to do everything that he actually had him go sit in the truck The other helper was young and told me he had just started being a mover; he was very nice and really tried to help the foreman since the large guys was such a nightmare for everyone to deal with. Once the very good worker left with his tools, I had to assist dismantle our bed and it was clear that we didn’t have the proper tools any longer to do the job efficiently so instead the foreman, the large worker and myself all had to struggle to take apart the king size bed for what should have taken 15 minutes took over an hour. Since the other foreman and his kids packed power and other tools without labeling or inventorying anything specific, I had to scrounge for anything usable to take apart the king size bed that had a serious headboard. We also paid to have our storage locker items moved. We had made it clear to both our salesman when he came to our home for the estimate and to both foremen that everything there needed to be repacked for the move. We met the crew there expecting them to pack the items and bring them to the trailer that was supposed to be within 25 miles of our home for shuttling our packed possessions. That is when we learned that there was no trailer ready within the area and that they now intended to move things to the home facility on the other side of CT to be loaded. Thus they said they would do the storage locker another time.This was now becoming a nightmare to keep up with what was going on. We had tried on Saturday to call the main office when no one showed up in the morning and then again Monday and Tuesday when things seemed to be going badly. We sent emails and left messages, but getting anyone to return a call was nearly impossible and when they did, there was no clarity as to what was going on.We then looked for an alternate method. In this case, the van line sent in a container for our people to load. The driver that we sent made a couple of errors in judgment and did not communicate adequately with our dispatch office. Because a tractor trailer could not get to the house, we would have to shuttle it with a smaller truck and then reload it onto the trailer. This was clear from the outset that a shuttle was needed and to be within 25 miles of our house – it was in the estimate and the contract, so why this was a surprise to anyone is very odd. He could not drive the two trucks , so the decision was made to have him shuttle it back to our yard. We did not do enough to ensure that this did not cause the delay. We met our commitment to get them out of the house on Wednesday the 29th. But we could g=have done things differently to avoid a 10 pm finish. They were at our house Monday through Wednesday until 9:30 or 10 not just the last day. This crew of three were also responsible each day to unload the truck and reload into a container, and then come to our house to continue packing and loading. This is where we could not see what was going on and that is where a tremendous amount of damage occurred. The movers on this end had 7 people working and were amazing. Three of them were ranked as foreman and the others were fantastic. The foreman all commented that this was either the worst or second worst trailer they had ever seen packed and kept apologizing for what we were going through as we saw item after item damaged and just the utter lack of care in packing that had taken place. It was also clear that when they packed our storage locker they had not repacked anything and that pillows that had been in black garbage bags were delivered without being repacked and other items ere not properly padded resulting in tremendous damage. We do not want our people working that late or any customer to be pout through this at such a late time. After it was loaded the trailer was shipped by rail to [redacted]. We paid for it to be driven, rail not part of the plan. Also it arrived a day later than any of the days listed in the contract and again we could not get any communication from Sterling as to where our trailer was. We were also not made aware that we could have slept in a hotel or had our food covered so we did not avail ourselves of this when we had been in [redacted] for 3 days without our belongings. After the delivery, we were made aware of the damage. We immediately started the claim process and notified North American. Ms. [redacted] submitted the first claims notification on 7/12. On 7/14, I contacted North American because she had not been contacted by the claims dept. The North American Claims Dept. has been handling it since that time. There are still a few items that have still not been handled and are in dispute. This claim is incredibly large and difficult due to the poor inventory list, extensive damage to antiques and the number of missing boxes. It seems as though the only thing Sterling has responded to here is the trouble they had getting driver to drive across country from NAVL and they have articulated that they didn’t know they had to shuttle our possessions due to the “driver”/foreman miscommunicating that a trailer could not get to our home, but as I have said, the cause of this damage is solely because you had a crew loading and unloading items without properly protecting them. Your crew was clearly stressed beyond reason and frankly they were not all qualified to be doing this job. Why when boxes are identified as missing and items are correspondingly missing we have to go to arbitration and no explanation or logic is used to accept some missing items and not others is beyond us. Furthermore, because the adjuster never explains anything and seems to be confused and unable to keep track of all the damage, we have had to work on these claims far harder than we should ever had to given how screwed up the front end of this move was. She had a repair company who is the only good part of this come out and assess all the damage. They had their upholster come out to fix some items, but when it came to the missing pillows from the storage locker sofa and chairs, we thought he would be evaluating the cost to reupholster the chairs and sofa. We put down numbers on the claim that were a guess at values since these items were my mothers and we did not originally buy the fabric or have them reupholstered; we were way off. Furthermore we didn’t think our valuation on these items would matter since he would be the one doing the work and his estimate would be what was considered. It seems he never was assigned to prepare estimates on these items. Then we went to match the fabric and get reupholster estimates and they are far more than we originally expected and thus we amended our claim. Instead of asking that same upholster to come up with a fair amount, they have just tried to stick to the original claim amount which was wrong and we have shown the real cost. SIRVA’s claim department is not consistent in their communication, they just want to deny claims on some missing items like carpet that disappeared and they pick and choose without explanation why they would cover one thing and not take responsibility for another. Why should we have to go to arbitration on so many items, this makes no sense. Secondly the amount that is left on our claims is astounding and thus from what I understand SIRVA can decide not to go to arbitration if claim is larger than $10,000 which it is with even the remaining items. This is all because of Sterling and they should take responsibility for their horrific crew and pathetic service. Any decent business owner would acknowledge their error and not put a family through what we have gone through. My wife is trying to survive cancer and I have 911 lungs from being down there, we don’t want or deserve this stress in our lives. If right now you refunded us close to what we paid we would be whole. I have spoken to a close friend who runs an antique business who has put me in touch with an owner of a respected moving company, he used to work for Allied and he in turn has explained very clearly why we are running into such opposition with the claims department and that is because they go back to you Sterling and then you try and put the blame on your “employees” who are in fact partially contracted and the blame is then not fully acknowledged by company that is initially hired, Sterling. Luckily he has put me in touch with attorneys who have in the past represented NAVL and are luckily not currently under retainer so they can represent me without a conflict of interest. I would suggest Sterling step up and avoid a lawsuit that I am at this point ready to begin. We have had it. The customer has been offered to have it go to arbitration so they can get by the impasse that had developed on a couple of items. Over a dozen items still in dispute. We even allowed several antiques to be repaired without claiming reduction in their value. Being fair and reasonable and trying to save NAVL money and create a win/win situation by suggesting a repair solution on the speaker that was around $1,600 vs. $7000, we get “DENIED” no explanation that makes any sense to anyone other than the adjuster who is screwing us over completely. This is just one example of the nonsense we have had to deal with SO we got screwed by Sterling and now screwed by NAVL Claims or should I say SIRVA claims persons. We never want anyone to experience what happened to this family. When it does, North American Van lines is committed to working to resolve the issues as soon as possible “to the extent of our liabilities”. This is doublespeak intended to screw damaged clients as much as possible and torture clients who have had similar experience. Once a job is screwed up, it appears no one is satisfied with the way the claims process unfolds – it is a complete disgrace. Should you require additional information or have any further questions, please contact me at your earliest convenience. [redacted]
I am writing in response to complaint [redacted] from a [redacted] regarding recent move from [redacted], Ma to [redacted], MD. The facts are that Mr. [redacted] and family did not receive the move that he should have received or that we intended that he receive. After we loaded Mr. [redacted]'s...
furniture on our truck , we had two drivers become unavailable. This resulted in the delay that caused his delivery to take place on 7/9 instead of the 3rd as we had originally agreed. When we knew we could not meet this delivery date, it was explained that we would be responsible for reasonable lodging and half of his food bills for every night we were late. This information was passed on to Mr. [redacted]. We have since settled the inconvenience claim with Mr. [redacted] and paid him for damage at origin and the speaker that was damaged. Unfortunately when we have drivers that become unavailable at that time of year it can issues like this. Due to safety issues, it can be impossible to recover. Should you require additional information or have any further questions, please contact me at your earliest convenience.
Revdex.com: I have reviewed the response submitted by the business and have determined that the response does not satisfy or resolve my issues and/or concerns in reference to complaint # [redacted] We are utilizing their reply and responding therein. See below bold responses and comments. ThanksSorry for the delay in the response. Ms. [redacted] received a poor move. We had set up her shipment with North American Van Lines (Sterling is an Agent for them) to move them to [redacted], Ct. North American did not have a driver available to load this shipment. There not finding a driver may well be true but the issue started day one when Sterling's supposed employees showed up to pack after lunch with a foreman and his 3-4 kids in tow plus a few other employees. That foreman never went through the home with us or provided the promised valuable items form and thought he was done for the day after about 2 hours. He said his kids were visiting him from I believe upstate New York and he wanted to spend some of the day with them We then explained that there was a lot more packing than meets the eye since we had put away a lot in the basement to have our house shown for sale look better. At some point soon thereafter her went downstairs with his kids unbeknownst to us, while we were overseeing other packing, and he and his kids boxed up items that were not intended to ever be sent to Colorado and other items all thrown into boxes without any order or proper care. His kids had already boxed things incorrectly upstairs when they did our bookshelves with no regard to order or identifying boxes with books vs. boxes with our record collection.Then on Monday another foreman was in charge (one who had been at the house on Saturday) he began numbering boxes with stickers and trying to inventory after the fact what had already been packed. We are not sure why he used both green and white stickers that had the same numbers to label items but on the delivery end of the move this made things infinitely more difficult to track. His effort to properly inventory the already packed possessions was guess work at that point and this has led to tremendous issues with our insurance claim since several items and boxes are missing. He tried to catch up and as a result never really did a good job of inventorying our possessions. He also never had a valuable item list. When we asked him for it, he said he didn't have one and was surprised that on Saturday the other foreman ([redacted]??) with the kids, had not provided it to us and should have walked though our house allowing us to identify those items. When this crew came late on Monday and started with 3 helpers, only the foreman and one helper knew how to pack properly; the other two were not up to speed. One worker was over 300 lbs and had trouble breathing, walking and in general knowing what to do. The foreman was not very happy about having to pack things with the crew he had been given. Aside from the foreman, the other good worker had to leave to another job and he took his tools with him leaving the foreman and his crew without proper tools to disassemble beds and other items. It was this worker who damaged my speaker on the front end and it was never inventoried as damaged although he said he would be sure to take care of it. (Then he was gone). This speaker is no longer made and the repair is not possible without buying a used speaker for parts if one can find them or buying new speakers. The cost of the new equivalent speaker from Thiel is $7000 for a pair. Also by Tuesday the foreman was so tired of having to tell the large worker what and how to do everything that he actually had him go sit in the truck The other helper was young and told me he had just started being a mover; he was very nice and really tried to help the foreman since the large guys was such a nightmare for everyone to deal with. Once the very good worker left with his tools, I had to assist dismantle our bed and it was clear that we didn’t have the proper tools any longer to do the job efficiently so instead the foreman, the large worker and myself all had to struggle to take apart the king size bed for what should have taken 15 minutes took over an hour. Since the other foreman and his kids packed power and other tools without labeling or inventorying anything specific, I had to scrounge for anything usable to take apart the king size bed that had a serious headboard. We also paid to have our storage locker items moved. We had made it clear to both our salesman when he came to our home for the estimate and to both foremen that everything there needed to be repacked for the move. We met the crew there expecting them to pack the items and bring them to the trailer that was supposed to be within 25 miles of our home for shuttling our packed possessions. That is when we learned that there was no trailer ready within the area and that they now intended to move things to the home facility on the other side of CT to be loaded. Thus they said they would do the storage locker another time.This was now becoming a nightmare to keep up with what was going on. We had tried on Saturday to call the main office when no one showed up in the morning and then again Monday and Tuesday when things seemed to be going badly. We sent emails and left messages, but getting anyone to return a call was nearly impossible and when they did, there was no clarity as to what was going on.We then looked for an alternate method. In this case, the van line sent in a container for our people to load. The driver that we sent made a couple of errors in judgment and did not communicate adequately with our dispatch office. Because a tractor trailer could not get to the house, we would have to shuttle it with a smaller truck and then reload it onto the trailer. This was clear from the outset that a shuttle was needed and to be within 25 miles of our house – it was in the estimate and the contract, so why this was a surprise to anyone is very odd. He could not drive the two trucks , so the decision was made to have him shuttle it back to our yard. We did not do enough to ensure that this did not cause the delay. We met our commitment to get them out of the house on Wednesday the 29th. But we could g=have done things differently to avoid a 10 pm finish. They were at our house Monday through Wednesday until 9:30 or 10 not just the last day. This crew of three were also responsible each day to unload the truck and reload into a container, and then come to our house to continue packing and loading. This is where we could not see what was going on and that is where a tremendous amount of damage occurred. The movers on this end had 7 people working and were amazing. Three of them were ranked as foreman and the others were fantastic. The foreman all commented that this was either the worst or second worst trailer they had ever seen packed and kept apologizing for what we were going through as we saw item after item damaged and just the utter lack of care in packing that had taken place. It was also clear that when they packed our storage locker they had not repacked anything and that pillows that had been in black garbage bags were delivered without being repacked and other items ere not properly padded resulting in tremendous damage. We do not want our people working that late or any customer to be pout through this at such a late time. After it was loaded the trailer was shipped by rail to [redacted]. We paid for it to be driven, rail not part of the plan. Also it arrived a day later than any of the days listed in the contract and again we could not get any communication from Sterling as to where our trailer was. We were also not made aware that we could have slept in a hotel or had our food covered so we did not avail ourselves of this when we had been in [redacted] for 3 days without our belongings. After the delivery, we were made aware of the damage. We immediately started the claim process and notified North American. Ms. [redacted] submitted the first claims notification on 7/12. On 7/14, I contacted North American because she had not been contacted by the claims dept. The North American Claims Dept. has been handling it since that time. There are still a few items that have still not been handled and are in dispute. This claim is incredibly large and difficult due to the poor inventory list, extensive damage to antiques and the number of missing boxes. It seems as though the only thing Sterling has responded to here is the trouble they had getting driver to drive across country from NAVL and they have articulated that they didn’t know they had to shuttle our possessions due to the “driver”/foreman miscommunicating that a trailer could not get to our home, but as I have said, the cause of this damage is solely because you had a crew loading and unloading items without properly protecting them. Your crew was clearly stressed beyond reason and frankly they were not all qualified to be doing this job. Why when boxes are identified as missing and items are correspondingly missing we have to go to arbitration and no explanation or logic is used to accept some missing items and not others is beyond us. Furthermore, because the adjuster never explains anything and seems to be confused and unable to keep track of all the damage, we have had to work on these claims far harder than we should ever had to given how screwed up the front end of this move was. She had a repair company who is the only good part of this come out and assess all the damage. They had their upholster come out to fix some items, but when it came to the missing pillows from the storage locker sofa and chairs, we thought he would be evaluating the cost to reupholster the chairs and sofa. We put down numbers on the claim that were a guess at values since these items were my mothers and we did not originally buy the fabric or have them reupholstered; we were way off. Furthermore we didn’t think our valuation on these items would matter since he would be the one doing the work and his estimate would be what was considered. It seems he never was assigned to prepare estimates on these items. Then we went to match the fabric and get reupholster estimates and they are far more than we originally expected and thus we amended our claim. Instead of asking that same upholster to come up with a fair amount, they have just tried to stick to the original claim amount which was wrong and we have shown the real cost. SIRVA’s claim department is not consistent in their communication, they just want to deny claims on some missing items like carpet that disappeared and they pick and choose without explanation why they would cover one thing and not take responsibility for another. Why should we have to go to arbitration on so many items, this makes no sense. Secondly the amount that is left on our claims is astounding and thus from what I understand SIRVA can decide not to go to arbitration if claim is larger than $10,000 which it is with even the remaining items. This is all because of Sterling and they should take responsibility for their horrific crew and pathetic service. Any decent business owner would acknowledge their error and not put a family through what we have gone through. My wife is trying to survive cancer and I have 911 lungs from being down there, we don’t want or deserve this stress in our lives. If right now you refunded us close to what we paid we would be whole. I have spoken to a close friend who runs an antique business who has put me in touch with an owner of a respected moving company, he used to work for Allied and he in turn has explained very clearly why we are running into such opposition with the claims department and that is because they go back to you Sterling and then you try and put the blame on your “employees” who are in fact partially contracted and the blame is then not fully acknowledged by company that is initially hired, Sterling. Luckily he has put me in touch with attorneys who have in the past represented NAVL and are luckily not currently under retainer so they can represent me without a conflict of interest. I would suggest Sterling step up and avoid a lawsuit that I am at this point ready to begin. We have had it. The customer has been offered to have it go to arbitration so they can get by the impasse that had developed on a couple of items. Over a dozen items still in dispute. We even allowed several antiques to be repaired without claiming reduction in their value. Being fair and reasonable and trying to save NAVL money and create a win/win situation by suggesting a repair solution on the speaker that was around $1,600 vs. $7000, we get “DENIED” no explanation that makes any sense to anyone other than the adjuster who is screwing us over completely. This is just one example of the nonsense we have had to deal with SO we got screwed by Sterling and now screwed by NAVL Claims or should I say SIRVA claims persons. We never want anyone to experience what happened to this family. When it does, North American Van lines is committed to working to resolve the issues as soon as possible “to the extent of our liabilities”. This is doublespeak intended to screw damaged clients as much as possible and torture clients who have had similar experience. Once a job is screwed up, it appears no one is satisfied with the way the claims process unfolds – it is a complete disgrace. Should you require additional information or have any further questions, please contact me at your earliest convenience. [redacted]