Poor Customer Advice

When looking for a new front door, you think it would be nice to be given some good sound advice on what to pick, and for it to last a pretty long time, say 20-25 years?

I've just had a customer in who has changed his front door 4 times in less than ten years, may well be less! He's had two timber doors, a composite, and the last was a wood grain PVCu panel door. The two timber doors he changed simply because he didn't really like them, which you can sort of understand. The composite door had to be changed after some failed DIY alterations. But the panel door was through no fault of his own.

He is having to change his current panel door due to the cracking. The company that put it in says he only has a 2 year guarantee on panels, but 10 years on frames. Strange, because I thought that most panels sold in this country had a 10 year guarantee. Obviously they didn't want to entertain the idea of replacing a panel to a door that should never have been sold to him in that design in the first place. Typical case of get the order and keep quiet.

This is the sort of salesmanship that does our industry no favours. Wood grained panelled doors should not be sold in south facing areas, simple stuff, yet companies ignore this and choose to sell the customer the door anyway, purposely not thinking of the future problems.

Rest assured the customer will be sold the right door, and should last him a lot longer than his previous installations!