Back to Kevin McCloud’s excellent book 43 Principles of Home.

Kevin’s principle number 27 is “Buy Authentic, buy only stuff that is made in a firm’s own factories where they look after the people they employ and the place where they are based”. Can we apply this advice to the purchase of bespoke fitted furniture for the home and if so why?

In part Kevin is speaking out against slave labour production in India and the far east, and who would not support him in that? He also refers to the carbon impact of importing manufactured goods from around the world. Obviously, you would not expect your made to measure fitted wardrobes to fall into those two categories – although I can’t be certain that some of the larger fitted bedroom and home office suppliers aren’t outsourcing abroad, they do shift standard size doors in large volume so the option must be open to them.

The relevant point in K Mc’s article is the sense of authenticity and pride in ownership that comes from buying hand-crafted products made in a small workshop and the connection with the craftsmen who make and install your furniture. He does live on a slightly different planet to the majority of us, being a highly successful television presenter, author and businessman and his propensity to extol the virtues of only buying the finest quality, ethically produced, organic and hand knitted products does seperate him from a large section of the Grand Designs audience; who must be average-income, wage-slaves like me; who’s life styles would become much constrained if we had to choose between a unique, hand-forged, wrought iron table lamp or a B&Q £20.00, imported equivalent plus a couple of opera/football tickets. The former giving employment to one worthy master crafstsman in a nearby village and the latter supporting the infrastructure that employs thousands of needy shop workers in the UK, many employees along an extensive supply chain and exploits but keeps from starvation a family in Indonesia or Somalia, as well as maintaining the whole panoply of people employed in providing our entertainments from sport to culture. Complex questions!

However, like Kevin, I have moving testimonials from clients who take great pride in their bespoke furniture that I and my colleagues have helped them to conceive and realise and who take satisfaction from the fact that they have seen the workshop in which it was made and enjoy the uniqueness and authenticity of their bespoke product.

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’.

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