Playbook, electrical contractor
The complaint that arrives the day after the report does
A large share of electrical complaints are not about work at all. They follow a report, they name an observation the customer did not want to read, and underneath them sits the suspicion that the person who found the problem is the person selling the remedy. In the abstract that is a fair thing to suspect. It is also a thing no technical explanation touches, and an assistant that tries to defend the coding has lost before it starts.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for complaints holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The most common complaint here follows an inspection rather than a job, and its real content is a conflict of interest rather than a fault, which means every sentence explaining why the finding was correct makes the situation worse.
- A second opinion frequently disagrees, because an observation carries a judgement about severity and two competent people can code the same finding differently, so insisting the first electrician was right is both risky and beside the point.
- Making good is the other half of the trade's complaints: chasing cables into plaster leaves a scar, a board change leaves holes, and whether the firm plasters and paints is a scope question customers assume in their own favour and firms rarely state.
- A complaint that touches on the safety of an installation stops being a service complaint at all, because it changes what the firm has to do next rather than how sorry it needs to sound.
How it arrives
- i think the report found faults that were not really there
- another electrician says it did not need doing
- the plaster was left in a mess after the rewire
- nobody has come back to finish the sockets
- the job took three days longer than we were told
- who do i complain to about the work
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Your complaints route, with a person and a timescale on it | Where a complaint goes, who reads it, and how long before a reply. Named as a route rather than offered as a general address, because a complaint that lands nowhere in particular reappears as a review. |
|---|---|
| What an observation on a report means and how severity gets decided | Written neutrally, as description rather than as a defence. A customer who understands that a code is a judgement about risk made by the person inspecting is in a far better position than one who has been told the report is simply correct. |
| What making good includes, and where it stops | Chasing, filling, plastering, painting, lifting and relaying flooring, and which of those sit inside your price. One clear paragraph here removes an entire category of complaint before it happens. |
| The scheme's own complaints procedure | That a customer unhappy with certified work can take it to the competent person scheme the firm is registered with, and roughly how. Publishing the route by which you can be complained about is a stronger signal than any promise you could make about quality. |
The reply
That is worth taking seriously and it is not something I can settle here. What I can tell you is how it works: an observation on a report carries a code for severity, that code is a judgement made by the electrician who inspected, and you are entitled to disagree with it [1]. Our complaints route goes to a named person and you get a reply within the period on that page [2]. If you would rather take it outside the firm, we are registered with a competent person scheme and it runs its own complaints procedure. Leave me your name, an email and the address and I will send this over now.
It concedes that the coding is a judgement, which is true, which the customer already suspects, and which is the only sentence that makes the rest of the reply credible. Handing over the route out of the firm is something a confident firm can afford and a defensive one cannot. Nothing in it says anything about the finding itself, because nothing here has seen the installation.
Where it stops
The trigger. Any complaint at all, on the first message, including one dressed up as a question about how coding works, and immediately anything alleging the installation is dangerous.
I am not the right place for this and I am not going to argue the point with you. Leave me your name, an email and the address and it goes to the person who handles complaints. If you think anything in the property is unsafe right now, please ring the number at the top of this page rather than wait for a reply.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never defend a coding or say the report was right, since nothing here has seen the installation and a confident defence turns a complaint into a dispute with a written record.
- Never say another electrician is wrong, because severity on an inspection is a judgement and two competent people can land in different places on the same finding.
- Never offer a refund, a discount, a free return visit or any goodwill gesture, as those are commercial decisions with a cost and they belong to whoever owns the firm.
- Never accept that work was unsafe or badly done, because an admission typed into a chat window gets quoted back and it was made without anybody looking at anything.
Questions
- Should it really admit another electrician might disagree?
- It should say that coding involves judgement, which is true and which every electrician knows. Pretending otherwise collapses the moment the customer has a second report in front of them, and it takes with it the credibility you needed for the rest of the conversation.
- Can it handle a complaint if we give it the complaints policy?
- No, and this is one of the few documents that makes the assistant worse when it answers from it. A complaint is a request to be heard by a person. The right behaviour is to take the name and stop. The policy is there so that the sentence about what happens next is accurate rather than invented.
- Is publishing the scheme complaints route inviting trouble?
- The customers who would use it can find it in about a minute anyway. Publishing it costs nothing and reads as a firm that expects to be judged, which is the opposite of the impression that turns a phone call into a public review.
Keep reading
- Everything for a electrical contractorCall out charges, EV charger enquiries and landlord certificates are answerable. A described electrical fault is an escalation, not a question.
- Handling complaints in generalThe job is to route, not to resolve. Acknowledge without conceding, name the escalation route, and get it to a person fast.
- Answering hours, working hours and the hours the power can be offThe phone is answered until five. A job that turns the supply off cannot start at three, and a test may only run when a building is empty.
- One date, and several diaries that are not the electrician'sScaffolding, a suspended bay, a second electrician and a supply appointment can all hang off one day, and moving it moves none of them.
- What has already been spent when a job is called offA board, a charge point unit or cable cut to length stops being stock the day it is ordered for one address. That is where the cost sits.
Try it on your own material
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