DS Waters – Hinkley Springs Water Delivery Service Review

You may not know who DS Waters is.  They are a large water delivery service that owns brands including Hinkley Springs, Alhambra, Athena, Belmont Springs, Crystal Springs, Deep Rock Water, Kentwood Springs, Mount Olympus, Nursery, Sierra Springs, Sparkletts, and Standard Coffee Service Company.  The product itself is great.  I know you are thinking it’s water… and you are right, except that I’ve had a lot of water (it is actually all I drink) and this water (Hinkley Springs is the brand we get here in Aurora, IL) is outstanding. It’s fresh, crisp, and tasty.  The problem is not the product, unfortunately the problem is the service.  I’m going to qualify this before I go on because I really want to be fair to this company.  It is likely that with a large organization this service is very good.  However, our satellite office with our 2 – 3 people coming in and out intermittently is not being serviced well.  Here is why:

1. The way their delivery service works the delivery time is variable.  The driver could show up at 9am or 5:30pm.
2. The delivery service (or at least our driver) seems to have a lot more faith in the occupants of our office building than we do.  If he does miss our staff he has no problem leaving free water for anyone that wants to pick up a 40 pound bottle of water outside our office door in the common hallway area.
3. Because he likes to drop water and run, and seems to have gotten into the habit of doing so we have not been able to return any of the bottles of water (empties, which are $6 bucks a piece), nor adjust the quantity of water for the coming two weeks (which is actually very necessary for us).  The result is we either have way too much or way too little/run out.  I’ll tell you… you begin to question why you have bottled water delivery the 2nd time you have to make a water run to the store and are lugging jugs of water up to your office.
4. Customer Service telephone number has a long hold time, when you do get in touch with someone and explain the issue they are more interested in collecting payment for bottles of water than addressing your concerns about your service.  I understand the need to get paid is a priority, but you need to understand that as a service my need to pay you stops when I end up doing all of the work I’m paying you to do! (If I’m lugging water to my office when I pay you to do it, I think… you owe me some money for doing your job).
5. I ordered the water and a water cooler online.  When I got my delivery they gave me the skinny cheap looking cooler that I didn’t order ON PURPOSE because it looked like it was tippy and I didn’t want that in the office.  The driver explained that it was the same thing and wasn’t tippy once it had a jug of water on it.  I said I wanted the other one anyway and he said they didn’t even make them anymore, continued to install the cooler like I wasn’t saying “hey I don’t want that one”.  Finally he agreed to “Check into it again” and I never heard from him again on it.  I called customer service… told them I was unhappy, told them I wasn’t going to pay for a cooler I didn’t order, used the word bait and switch and what do you know… I had the cooler I actually ordered in 48 hours.  Amazing.  After that the drop and run routine got more routine and I haven’t been able to tailor my water order since.

Maybe I’m being unreasonable. I don’t think I am.  It’s water delivery not rocket science, and perhaps I have a driver that is distracted, has issues at home, or perhaps it’s just a series of unfortunately events that led up to this.  I can’t tell you.  What I can tell you is that I am not getting what I paid for.  I called them up and they told me they were going to come get the equipment like I asked and then informed me that I was going to get charged a $100 early termination fee.  (I signed no such agreement).  Threats of fees to keep me on as a customer.  Are you kidding me?  If she had told me hey we are really sorry, how about you give our driver the empty bottles, keep the water you used… we’ll give you another bottle and you think on it for a few weeks I might have said OK I’ll do that.  I might have even been a happy customer.  Instead I got the Tony Soprano “F*** you pay me” routine.  The problem with that routine is Tony Soprano is from New Jersey.  I’m from Chicago and we don’t play that here.