Issues of product quality and customer service up and down the supply chain have been on the radar of the fenestration industry for a few years now. Of course the landscape of the sector has changed massively over the past decade. I doubt many will have predicted that the window and door industry would look like it does today.

So much has changed in the past ten years, but the issues of product quality and customer service have risen to the fore in the past few years. It has led to me to ask the question: is quality and service actually better now than it was ten years ago?

Poll on Twitter

Naturally, I have put this question to my followerson Twitter:

The vote is fairly split right now, although the “no” vote is a nose ahead at the moment.

I ask this question now as our industry becomes ever more diverse, demands from installers driven by home owners are increasingly strict, where we operate in a world where we all expect instant results, thanks to social media and online ordering.

There have also been some fairly high profile cases of companies and installers falling out with each other in the past few years, where product quality and customer service have been at the core of the complaint. In some of the conversations I have with people they tell me that ten or so years ago it was indeed better than this. Things were simpler. There were less products, less pressure, home owners were easier to deal with.

Speaking from a personal point of view, I have to agree. Each year the amount of products available becomes bigger. You have to consider the argument that the more a company does, the harder it is to deliver on quality and service. The difficulty is that installers also want their suppliers to be able to offer as much as possible. Fabricators are caught between a rock and a hard place.

So how to solve it?

Effective planning

When it comes to quality and customer service, it all comes down to planning. Whether you’re a big company already offering a multitude of products and services, or a company preparing to break out and increase your offering, it all comes down to effective planning.

Companies need to find out what the main concerns from their customers are and ensure that they have systems in place to either prevent those problems from happening, or make sure something else is in place to efficiently deal with the problem. Companies need to make sure they have the best people in place to deal with customers. I cannot stress enough how important a good team of people is to a business.

If you plan, you’re already on the right footing to deal with whatever might come your way. But I want to give companies a bit of slack here as well.

Home owners are the main driver behind complaints, and quite frankly, the amount of rogue and problem customers are on the rise. I have noticed this at our place, and whoever I speak to who is home owner-facing, they say the same. I often get private message of frustration from companies who are tearing their hair out at home owners giving unreasonable demands. So whilst its fair to say that quality and service within fenestration is an issue that needs, solving, an increasingly vocal and difficult proportion of the general public isn’t making things any easier.

As always with DGB polls, I will report back in a weeks time with the final results. Please take the time to vote above and help make the results as accurate as possible!

UPDATE: 26/11/19 9:50am: since publishing the poll has since shifted to show “yes” in the lead. This is a change from “no” when the article was originally posted.

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