Check your purchase before you take it away
I’ve bought tiles from the Yortile shop in Huddersfield (and their predecessors) on numerous occasions. Usually the experience has been satisfactory, but a recent incident has left me wondering whether they have a proper handle on customer service.
I needed a relatively small number of Original Style tiles to match ones I’d bought from them some years ago to facilitate a bathroom refurbishment, a total of 80 tiles. I was given an approximate delivery date of around a week, which was fine. I was told I’d get a phone call when they arrived. The bathroom fitters brought the start date of the job forward a week, so I needed them sooner than anticipated. I rang the shop after a week – they’d actually arrived some days previously but I’d not had the call. No matter – they were there and the fitter needed them immediately so I went to the shop straight away to pick them up. I was told on arrival that some of the tiles were broken, but as the fitter would need to cut some it should be OK. I knew that I’d over ordered, and I had a few spare at home so decided not to make an issue of it and get them home so the job wasn’t stopped.
The fitter unboxed them and found half a dozen clearly broken tiles, but also discovered several more that were damaged at the corners to varying degrees. Mainly intact, but unusable as full tiles. In total he told me that around 20 were damaged. He was, to be polite, surprised that Yortile had let me take them away without offering either recompense or a re-order. I was just bothered that he had enough to do the job, which as it turned out he had. The repair was completed; I saved the good tiles, and put all the damaged tiles in the rubbish bags that were to be taken away.
The refurbishment was quickly finished and I forgot about the incident. However, I was kindly asked by Inter Ceramica to review my recent experience of purchasing from them. I believe honest reviews are an excellent consumer resource, and contribute whenever I feel it to be appropriate. I contacted Yortile to give someone an opportunity to comment on the situation before I left a review. The manager of the shop was very pleasant about it. He said it would be normal practice to replace tiles that are broken, and that they would refund any damaged tiles if I returned them. I’d already explained that without scouring the local waste disposal sites it was unlikely that I’d be able to return any. However, when I picked them up the staff at the shop at no point offered to replace the broken tiles that they were aware of, or told me to return any broken ones. As such it seems the understanding of company policy between management and the shop floor is disconnected.
In reality the issue is a minor one to me. Any refund as a proportion of the cost of the job would be miniscule and that’s not what interests me. However, the incident is one that potential customers may want to consider when choosing a supplier.
Lessons learnt – order well in advance if possible and allow time to thoroughly check the delivery before you take it away. Also, if damaged tiles are later discovered, don’t chuck them away….
December 10, 2020
Unprompted review