If you plan on attending Queens College and are looking into residential life on campus, be warned: The Summit may “rip” you off.
The only way a business is successful over the long-haul, is by doing good business. What exactly is doing good business? Good business is providing the customers with a product that they have sought out and paid for with their hard-earned cash. The next step in good business is making sure that customer is satisfied with that product and keeping an open line of contact for any questions, comments, or concerns from the customer.
Why should businesses be so concerned about satisfying the customer? 1) They are separating the customer from money that was earned by hours of that customer’s life. To conduct business without seeking customer satisfaction is in essence telling customers that their life and time do not matter as long as the business gets paid. Who wants a relationship(professional or personal) with a party that doesn’t care about their well-being? 2) Unhappy customers speak out about businesses that have shady business practices and try to bring awareness of this to other potential customers. If businesses don’t want bad reputations, they should make sure they are using business practices that are customer friendly.
What’s this all have to do with “The Summit?” Anyone applying for housing there will notice that there is a $400 mandatory deposit to even apply. This deposit is refundable only if a person requests it back within two days of them receiving the person’s check, or if they don’t have any rooms available. So if you are a customer who can only afford the least expensive housing option that they offer, be very wary about signing up to live there. When you go about filling out the application, you have the choice of which housing option you would like to “order” for an allotment of time(either one semester or full academic year.)
I use the word “order” because I see this type of transaction as being very similar to that of purchasing something online. You click the button “Add to Cart” and then checkout when you are finished shopping. This is where it gets messy. For the online transaction, if they can’t provide you with the product that you “Added to Cart” and purchased with your hard earned cash, they typically will refund you or give you credit towards another purchase letting you know that they value the relationship between you and your money and them as a business. ”The Summit” on the other hand, has no respect for you as a customer.
Before I sent off my application with MY MONEY($400), I called to make sure that they had the room that I could afford still available. Their response: Rooms are filling up fast so send your application(money) in ASAP and you will have a better chance of getting a room. (notice the vague response and direction away from the question of whether they had the product I wanted to pay for available.) So I filled out the application and sent it in money and all; unwittingly believing that they actually cared about providing me(a customer from Nebraska with no chance to talk in person) with a good product. A week later(because a week is past the 2day grace period of getting my money back no questions asked) I was informed that they didn’t have any rooms that I could afford and that I “ordered”, but if I wanted to I could put my deposit towards the rooms that are out of my price range. Knowing that I could get a refund for them not having a room available upon applying, I declined their offer and asked for my refund so that I could put it towards finding housing in NYC. Response: sorry we still have rooms available even though none of them are the ones you applied(ordered) for specifically and we are protected through the refund policy because there are still the expensive rooms affordable. So if I was online, ordered a product, paid for that product, and they didn’t have any available; with “The Summit’s” way of reasoning they have every right to keep MY MONEY and extract more of MY MONEY from me by upselling me. But it doesn’t matter if they get the upsell or not, they still get to keep MY MONEY. That makes me think of something I learned in Marketing class: Bait and Switch (it also makes me think of theft.)
They did inform me however that if the housing filled up then I would be able to get MY MONEY(how nice of them) back. I was able to get $150 of the $400 back since I wasn’t going to live there and that portion of money is reserved for any damages that I may have caused to the establishment had I lived there. So at the start of this semester I went in to check up and see if they had filled up so I could get the remaining $250 of MY MONEY. And to my surprise, they had no vacancy so I was delighted to think that I was going to get my money back. I’m so simple-minded. Not only are they still looking into deciding if my file is deserving of a refund(funny to think that a business gets to decide whether I should get MY MONEY back when they have provided no service or product to me whatsoever besides a headache), but the director had the audacity to say she couldn’t believe they had even given me $150 back. If you ever have to deal with the director be ready for short, unclear email responses, a dismissive attitude, lack of response to emails or calls, and an overall lack of good business communication/practices.
Thank you Summit for helping me make this transition from Nebraska to New York. I understand why some businesses have good reputations and others don’t. This was a great lesson to be learned, and I’m happy to do you the courtesy of writing a customer review with this blog.
