Carpenter Or Specialist Fitted Furniture Maker?

Five reasons to spend more money and deal with a specialist Fitted Furniture company so far

. Now lets consider the sixth.

Last week I discussed looking at letters of recommendation or testimonials from the companys existing customers. This can be very very helpful in giving you the confidence to invest more of your hard earned money with an established cabinet making supplier, rather than the independent carpenter but I did point out that these, supposedly, unsolicited testimonials if not all written by the managing directors aunt, have their limitations in that they will inevitably have been audited, if only to the extent that letters of complaint heaven forfend that a reputable company would ever receive such things will have been filed elsewhere, possibly in the waste bin.

Better still ask whether your potential supplier of wardrobes, study furniture or a home entertainment centre carries out its own Customer Satisfaction Survey and see if you will be allowed to peruse the results. Any home improvement company that honestly cares about its levels of customer satisfaction should be conducting such a survey on a regular basis to establish where the shortcomings are and what can be done to improve performance.

The benefits of this practice to a prospective client are twofold: firstly, the very fact that a company conducts such a survey is indicative of a positive attitude to the perfection of customer service and, providing the company is prepared to share the resulting data and that it is read intelligently, it can indicate, more accurately than a selection of glowing testimonials, how well the company is performing.

These surveys usually take the form of questionnaires asking clients to rate a range of performance indicators such as product quality or staff competence through multiple choices ranging from very bad to excellent. Because all clients are rating the same functions by predefined criteria it is easier to take a broad view of how satisfied the average customer is without peaks of vitriol or hyperbole. There is usually a comment section at the end of the questionnaire that allows the client some freedom of expression but it is the general trend in answers to specific questions that offer the greater insights into a companys customer service performance.

Let us assume that the company you are considering buying custom made fitted furniture from have a file of customer satisfaction surveys and that they are happy to share them. Lets think about how they should be interpreted: Firstly, are there a sprinkling of ticks in the boxes marked Poor or Bad? Believe me, if every response is Good or above something is amiss. No company ever achieves universal approval from all its customers and if all the clients surveyed are happy bunnies, you are looking at a faked, or at least heavily audited, set of surveys.

Secondly, where there are a sprinkling of negative comments, and it should only be a sprinkling, do the clients comments show that the problems were resolved. Dont expect to find a company that never makes mistakes, look for one that employs fallible human beings who occasionally err but uses those opportunities to show their customer service strengths to earn plaudits for correcting them.

Lastly, if every survey sheet is Bad run a mile, but in those circumstances you probably wont get to see them anyway. However, ignore the odd sheet in which all the questions are answered in the negative, provided it is only the odd sheet. Believe it or not, there is such a thing as The Customer From Hell, they are rare and one does ones best but as anybody who has ever worked in customer service will tell you you cant win em all. The important thing is that you try and try your best, not just try your best as in thats the best we can do but try your best as in Try, try again and then try even harder.

by: Madeline Lancaster

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