To recap on the merits of the bespoke cabinet making company vis-a-vis a carpenter:

Carpenter: Price; an independent tradesman, with low overheads, should always be cheaper than a fitted furniture company.

Bespoke Fitted Furniture Company: Design Service, Product Quality, Showroom Facility, Guarantee, Testimonials, Customer Satisfaction Surveys, Project Management. That’s seven good reasons for spending more and going to the experts. That’s not to say that the carpenter cannot offer any of these benefits but he is unlikely to offer all of them. To read them all, start with my post of 7th July.

And the eighth? After Sales Service.

No matter that the ordering process includes measuring the job four times and that you have received a set of technical drawings, samples and a detailed finish schedule, everybody in the team is an experienced professional and the process has been revised over many years and tested to destruction. Murphy’s law says that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong: A component gets damaged, the paint manufacturer sends in the wrong colour lacquer, a dimension is misread and not picked up. Every snag is unique in some way, otherwise a recurring problem should have been designed out of the system but try as they will to provide the perfect product, customer expectations are as varied as the customers and human errors do occur.

No manufacturer, in any industry, is perfect;  it’s not necessarily what goes wrong but how the supplier reacts when it does that matters. Business relationships are not always built on getting it right first time every time but often on putting it right promptly and with minimum fuss.

The independent tradesman, who may have moved on to his next installation by the time you find a problem and may not be able to be as responsive as you would like. Also, it is human nature to react by defending your own workmanship. This is not always compatible with good customer service practice.

When an individual has designed, made and installed the your new fitted bedroom or home entertainment units it can become very personal if you need to report a problem, and with no designer, draftsman or surveyor to blame he may struggle to rise above his own error and give the correct customer service response, which is always: How can I put this right and restore the goodwill?

Also, it is often easier for the customer to report a problem to the administrator responsible for customer service than to confront the individual who made the error directly. If the design, drafting, surveying, manufacturing and installation functions all reside in one person, somebody who has worked in your home for a week or more and who you have plied with tea and biscuits, who else can you complain to and expect a constructive and pragmatic resolution?

Six arguments so far in favour of using a specialist fitted furniture company, and the seventh? Project Management.

Sure you expect the installation of your fitted wardrobes or home office furniture to run smoothly and be right first time but, in the best of all possible worlds, problems do occur.

A professional bespoke furniture supplier will have a sophisticated project management system in place and will employ a team of people, each with an allocated role in the process, typically: designer, draftsman, surveyor, production scheduler, bench joiner, sprayer/finisher, quality controller, delivery driver, installer/fitter and administrater. That’s ten individuals, each with a key role to play in ensuring that the process runs smoothly, fits in with your programme and achieves a result that meets, and hopefully exceeds, your expectations.

In today’s difficult trading conditions, no supplier can hope to stay competitive without the leanest possible infrastructure, and yet, all ten of these key roles must be fulfilled and their functions coordinated or customer satisfaction is put at risk. The independent carpenter cannot be expected to wear ten hats at once and, although their partner may act as administrator and some functions, such as delivery driver and installer can be combined, much functionally within the project is put at risk by not having independent oversight.

There is an old carpenter’s adage that says ‘measure twice, cut once’ and it is a sound principle when applied to making and installing anything custom-made or bespoke. However, the protection provided by this practice is far greater when the second measure is conducted by a third party. it’s far too easy to repeat an error when checking you own work. Effectively, an efficient fitted furniture maker take the measurements four times: the designer on the first visit, the draftsman who ‘closes the survey’ by adding together all the designer’s measurements and angles: wall, window, right angle, wall, alcove, right angle, wall, doorway,right angle, wall,  pillar wall and , hopefully arrives back at the same place. If correct, the survey closes, if not a mis-measure is suspected. The job is than re-measured by the surveyor before manufacture and finally, for the fourth time by the fitter, on-site, before he begins the installation.

Management of  the project is the key role of the administrator whose job it is to coordinate the functions of the other nine members of the team, ensuring a smooth process and a delighted customer.

That’s a lot to ask of even the most talented carpenter.

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 recomendation or testimonials from the company’s 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 director’s  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 recieve 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 improvment 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 two fold: 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  questionaires 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 questionaire 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 company’s 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. Let’s 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 client’s comments show that the problems were resolved. Don’t expect to find a company that never makes mistakes, look for one that employs fallible human beings who occassionally 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 won’t 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 can’t win em all’. The important thing is that you try and try your best, not just try your best as in ‘that’s the best we can do’ but try your best as in ‘Try, try again and then try even harder’.

So far we have examined the pros and cons of using the specialist company rather than a carpenter when buying bespoke fitted furniture and established that their are potential benefits in: a design service, product quality, a showroom in which to see finished product and benchmark  the putative installion and a full 10 year, insurance backed guarantee to offset the extra expenditure of using the professionals.

Now lets look at how you might gain from the experience of others: If you do use a carpenter, be sure to ask to talk to some of his old customers and, if possible, see some of his work. Not only does this compensate for the lack of a showroom but the opportunity to share somebody else’s experience could give you the confidence you need and help avoid a costly mistake.

Any well established cabinet making company will be able to furnish you with the details of past customers in your area but you may find this a tiresome and embarrassing experience, asking complete strangers to let you into their home to look at their fitted bedoom furniture. Many people find looking through letters of recommendation or ‘testimonials’ a much more user friendly excercise.

A proper fitted furniture specialist with a showroom you can visit and an adminastrative infrastructure should keep a library of letters of commendation that you can browse through. If they have not received any such letters, be very suspicious.

Ideally, you should be presented with a book or folder containing a substantial number of testimonials dated over a long period of time, perhaps several years. Do be cautious; look for different types of paper, handwriting and styles. Pick one at random and ask to see the drawings that relate to this client. Surely, nobody would create false letters of satisfaction? Would they??

Also, bear in mind that these commendations have been audited. Any company that has been in business over a period of years will have received letters of complaint – surprisingly, these will not be included in the folder!

Look out for phrases like ‘We were annoyed when we discovered that he wrong doors had been delivered but were very impressed that you sorted the problem out so promptly and with the minimum of fuss’. Everybody makes mistakes sometimes and a good supplier will earn more Brownie points for sorting out the inevitable problems efficiently than they might from getting right first time.

Do not settle for the film or theatre promoter’s trick of just quoting short phrases like ‘We are very impressed by the quality’, when the full phrase might have been ‘We are very impressed by the quality it’s just a pity that the after sales service was so appalling’. Insist on seeing the full text.