IntelliDent Paintless Dent Repair

This email is in response to complaint ID [redacted] submitted by [redacted]   It is with great pride that IntelliDent offers a Limited Lifetime Warranty. We proudly list it on our website and marketing materials, and it's a service our...

customers love. I would also like to mention that IntelliDent is a Paintless Dent Repair company specializing in hail damage repair and restoration. This means that we perform no paint or body work on vehicles; anytime that is needed we subcontract with a third party. We repair the hail from the bottom side of the panel and the dents come out with no damage to the paint or structure restoring the panel to like-new condition. This process generally takes one to two weeks from start to finish, including the time needed to work with the customer's insurance.   On larger repair jobs such as this customer's, Paintless Dent Repair will not suffice for the repair demands. Hail can sometimes cause such severe damage that one or many panels must be replaced or have body work performed to fully restore the vehicle. My General Manager let the customer know that her roof, hood, and both roof rails would need to have body and paint work, and it would extend the number of days the customer's car would be in the shop. We relayed this to the customer, and she understood and was okay with it.   For the body work needed, we subcontracted with the body shop that actually shares the building with us on Marbach Road, Select One. They are a renowned body shop, very highly rated and loved in the San Antonio area. We use them because they do good work, and since we have such a high standard when it comes to repairs, we need a shop that knows what they're doing. Because of their popularity, they were extremely busy during the time the customer brought her car to us, and they were experiencing a back up in their paint booth. I let the customer know about the backup and she was fine with it, especially given that her insurance company was paying for the rental car.   When she picked up her car, she was very happy with the paint and body work, especially since we had repaired some scratches to the bedside quarter panel of her 2008 Honda Ridgeline free of charge that were unrelated to the hail repair. She had a brand new hood (the old hood had rock chips and surface scratches which were now gone) and an excellent paint job on the sides of the car along with fresh pin stripping around the entire car.  She appeared very happy to have her car back and looking great and immediately loaded her 50+ pound pitbull into the back of the car.    Upon further inspection, she asked if her car had gotten wet. I told her no. She then exhibited distress that the car was dirty on the interior and pointed out a few things that looked off to her. One thing was that her Owner's Manual and Bible had appeared to have gotten wet, although they were completely dry at the time. We told her that this could have happened when the we took everything out of the car before it went into the paint booth and perhaps those items got wet when another nearby car was being washed. The other items items she pointed out were scratches on the leather seats, a black mark on the leather, the glove compartment door stop appeared to be malfunctioning, and there were scratches on a couple interior trim pieces. I told her no problem, that we would take her word for it that these things were not like this when she brought in the car, and that we would fix those things. It's important to note here that the IntelliDent individual who DID check in the vehicle upon drop off by the customer is no longer with our company, and the customer was aware of this when she picked up her car because I had told her in an earlier conversation. Therefore there was no way to verify that any of this was not preexisting. We told the customer to go ahead and take her car that day, and then we scheduled a time to leave the car for a full day to perform a full interior detail and promised we would fix every single thing she pointed out. We even offered to go pick up the car from her work and deliver it back to her to eliminate her having to come back and forth to our shop.   In between the time she picked her car up and the day we had scheduled for her to leave it, she brought the car back to show us a few more things she noticed. One of the items was that the edge of her bumper popped out when she stepped on it when trying to climb into the bed of the truck. The customer seemed overly upset about this, made an unnecessary scene in front of other customers, and we never could figure out why she decided to stop by that day and yell at us about it, especially since she was scheduled to come in in a few days anyway and she could have pointed it out then. We went ahead and inspected the vehicle on the spot, and determined that the reason her bumper was popping out was because it had been severely rear ended and there were clips on the interior that were broken that were meant to keep the bumper in place. We pointed this out to the customer, and she disagreed, stating that it had never done that previously. Her feelings were that we had left out pieces that were in there before the repair out of negligence, although we were certain that there were no additional pieces needed on the bumper itself and that nothing had been left out. We even called the Honda dealership to verify, and they confirmed that no additional pieces came standard with this particular year, make, and model of Ridgeline. They further confirmed that if the clips were broken, then it would make sense that the bumper would pop out when any pressure was applied. The customer herself called Honda to verify this, and they told her the same thing. We did however, as a courtesy, do some extensive research on this issue, and were able to find through reading online blogs that this was a common problem that 08 Ridgelines had. Through our research, we were able to find some pieces from a newer model of Honda Ridgeline that would fit inside her bumper and solve the problem of it popping out. We went ahead and ordered those pieces to help the customer out and installed them later in the process.   When we picked up the car for the interior detail and minor repairs, there were then MORE items she had "noticed" on the interior of the car. There was supposedly a gap in between the rear back glass trim piece and the bedside, the cigarette lighter cover didn't close properly, there was a gap between the interior console and the dash, she stated the right rear door weatherstripping appeared stretched out, plus a plethora of other scratches all over the interior. Even though a majority of the items she picked out would have had nothing to do with scope of repairs we performed (neither by us or by the subcontracted body shop), we still hired a leather specialist to condition and repair a few scratches she pointed out on the seats, we ordered the new rear glass trim piece, a cigarette lighter cover, we readjusted the interior console, and most importantly, we performed an entire interior detail. Every single panel was cleaned and fixed that she pointed out, we did a full leather conditioning treatment, shampooed the carpets,etc. which was a process we paid nearly $600 to an outside company for. When she picked up her vehicle, she was happy with the cleanliness, but since we had just ordered the additional parts that day that would need replaced instead of fixed, we told her we would have to have the car brought back in to complete the installation. At this time, we also noticed that we had missed a couple dents on her tailgate, however we didn't have a technician in store at that time, but since she'd need to bring the truck back once those parts were in anyway, we let her know we would have the technician fix those last few dents at that time.   On the third time we picked the customer's car up from her work to fix the tailgate and install the previously ordered parts, we were shocked at how dirty the interior of the car had gotten in less than a week's time frame. We even took a video of it when we got it back to the shop as documentation of such. The brand new pin stripping we had had done just two weeks prior had been scratched off in one place on the passenger bed side, and there was even a fresh scratch in her leather that was no doubt caused by the nails of her pitbull considering the amount of dirt on the surface of the seats which included paw prints. Never the less, we detailed the car AGAIN, installed those last few parts for her, fixed the remaining tailgate dents, replaced the right rear door weatherstrip, we adjusted the front bumper from a previous collision that was NOT related to the hail loss, installed the previously mentioned pieces (again, not related to the hail loss) in the rear bumper to prevent the collision-damaged bumper from popping out when she stepped on it, and even did another full leather conditioning treatment.    When we delivered the car back to her the third time, we even brought a $200 check intended to replace the Honda Ridgeline Owner's Manual and the Bible that she claimed had gotten wet during the time we had the car, even though there was no way to verify that the Bible and handbook had not been wet from a previous and unrelated incident. Since we don't typically inventory the condition of everything inside a customer's car (in fact we require that they remove anything bulky or valuable from the vehicle prior to drop off to prevent situations like this from happening), there was no way to reasonably assume this water damage happened while in our possession. Never the less, we provided the customer with a $200 conciliatory check for said items and went over the repairs performed on the truck that day.   The customer was satisfied with the front and rear bumper repair, the parts replaced, the tailgate dent repair, the cleanliness, and the $200 check. All that being said, she was angry that her leather seats did not "feel the same" as they did before she dropped off the car, and was demanding that we replace them. There is absolutely nothing about hail damage repair performed on the exterior of a car that could cause any damage to the way her leather "felt." We did side-by-side comparisons with other leather seats of similar vehicles as well as other Ridgelines, and could detect no difference in the way her leather "felt" versus other leather seats. At this point, we felt like we were simply being taken advantage of and told her that we would not be replacing her leather seats. It's our belief that the customer mistook our kindness (fixing everything that was in no way related to the scope of our repairs) as weakness. When we finally had to put our foot down that we would not be replacing her seats, the customer got extremely nasty. It was a level of freak out I've never ever seen by one of my customers, and could have even been indicative of some level of mental instability. I tried to console her by pointing out everything we had done to help fix her car that was 100% not our fault, pointed out how the brand new pin stripping had already been damaged after just a few weeks, that the car had come to us dirty inside and there was a fresh scratch when it came to us earlier that day, but it was apparent that nothing I could say would calm her down. She even went so far as to insult me on a personal level, an act I can only assume comes from perhaps her own insecurities and guilt that she was in fact attempting to take advantage of our kindness and get us to fix things she knew had been preexisting.     At this point, if the customer has any LEGITIMATE problems she would like us to address, I welcome her to contact us. Other than that, her car looked amazing once we were through with it. We have put close to $3,000 into her car fixing things that were in fact not damaged by us or by the body shop just in an attempt to appease her, and we feel we have gone above and beyond. Just like in day to day life, there will always be people that no matter what you do for them, it's never enough, and as a small business, I can only allow people like that to take advantage of us for so long before we have to put a stop to it.   [redacted] IntelliDent Paintless Dent Repair