When a Customer Disputes the Quality of Your Work

What the standard actually is

Reasonable care and skill: what a competent person in your trade would achieve. Not perfection, and not the customer's preference.

Materials you supply must be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose, and as described.

That means a tile laid badly fails the standard. A tile laid well in a colour they have gone off does not, but see below, because how you handle the second matters as much as the first.

Your right to put it right

This is the part trades most often do not know, and it works in your favour.

Where work is defective, the customer's first remedy is normally repeat performance, you fixing it, at your cost. They generally cannot go straight to another trade and bill you, and if they do, their position is weaker than it would have been.

So the worst response to a complaint is refusing to engage. That is exactly what pushes a customer into hiring someone else and coming after you for the cost.

Ask to inspect. In writing. Then go.

Handling the complaint

1. Respond quickly, even if only to say you will come and look. Silence reads as guilt.

2. Look at it properly. Take your own photographs.

3. Separate the issues. Some complaints contain a genuine defect, a misunderstanding about scope, and a change of mind, all in one message. Deal with each on its own terms.

4. Say what you will do and by when. Then do it.

5. Keep it in writing. Not adversarially, just so there is a record of what was raised and what you offered.

When you think they are wrong

Sometimes the work is fine and the expectation was not.

Say so clearly and without heat, explain the standard, and offer to have it looked at independently. A trade who says "I'm confident this meets standard, and I'm happy for someone independent to assess it" is in a strong position. One who becomes defensive is not, whatever the truth.

Do not use a customer's lack of technical knowledge against them in writing. It reads badly to whoever sees it next.

Where it goes if you cannot agree

Two competent people can genuinely disagree about whether work meets standard. That is what independent dispute resolution is for, someone qualified looks at the evidence from both sides and decides.

Faster than court, cheaper for both of you, and it ends the argument. Where the customer is being unreasonable, it is usually the fastest way to establish that.