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PRO INSTALLER DECEMBER 2015
PRO NEWS
@proinstaller1
CLOSING SALES
THE RIGHT WAY
PERSUADING a customer that you are the right contractor for
the job is not always easy. Competition in many areas is tight,
and consumers are often sceptical or wary. Offering peace
of mind in these circumstances often makes the difference
between sealing the deal and losing out to a competitor.
FENSA WARNS
OF BANK
DETAILS SCAM
Criminals are telephoning
FENSA registered installers
claiming to be from FENSA
- and asking for their bank
card details.
A lot is to do with gut feeling – people often make their
minds up about a tradesperson or employee within
minutes or even seconds of
meeting them.
But there is no better way of
displaying trustworthiness and
integrity than offering a guarantee
on the work completed, a guarantee on any deposit paid, and a
cast-iron deal that ensures the customer has to sign off and approve
any payments made for each stage
of the work.
This is at the heart of the Home
Improvement Guarantee – the
FCA regulated holding account
into which the customer places
the money for the job before it
commences, and then releases the
staged payments upon satisfactory
completion.
Also, offering an independent
dispute resolution service is a
great way to add to that peace
of mind, ensuring that if there is
a disagreement, an independent
professional will make a binding
ruling.
Such transparency is good for
the tradesperson too, because
what the media don’t report is the
number of times that builders get
“burned” by “cowboy customers.”
Being able to see that they have
enough money to pay for a complete job gives great peace of mind
to tradesperson too.
However, for times when there
are disputes, the HIG has a built-in
dispute resolution service which
is agreed and signed before the
job begins and is binding on both
parties.
“Firstly, let’s be clear” says Harvey
Ellingham, founder of HIG. “This
situation hardly ever arises. We’ve
had about four disputes in the last
200 contracts we’ve cleared.
“But when it does happen we’ll
first use a bit of good old common
sense. It’s usually just a matter
of poor communication. So we’ll
have a word with both parties and
usually we can come to a decent
compromise where one or both
of the parties can see they have
become bogged down in a bit of a
stubborn position. That works in
95% of the time.
“Whoever instigates the complaint pays for the chartered
surveyor, at a vastly reduced fee
of £170 especially for the HIG
scheme. He or she will come along
and make an adjudication about
whether the work has been done
up to standard and in accordance
with the specs. If it has, the contract will continue.
“If it hasn’t, then the contractor
will be released from the job and
a new contractor will be called in
to finish the job. And remember,
this is only possible because the
client’s money is in the regulated
holding account !” Harvey concludes.
homeimprovementguarantee.co.uk
They are claiming that this information is required so that FENSA
can refund installers monies that
it owes them. They tell installers
that FENSA has sent out a letter
about refunds and that they are
following up on this letter.
FENSA will never contact installers asking for their bank account
or card information – and is not in
the process of refunding monies to
any registered businesses. FENSA
has not sent out any letters about
refunds.
If an installation company has
been telephoned in this way they
should contact the police by dialling 101 and give this crime number: NFRC151101236514. They
should also report it to FENSA.
The scammers appear to be using publicly available information
from the FENSA website – company name, address and telephone
number – to target installers.
FENSA has contacted the police
and reported this activity to Action
Fraud.
FENSA has immediately emailed
all registered businesses and posted a log in message on the website to warn them of this p