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HMG Paints Andover – customer care!
Hi All, seeing that recent thread about Ashby prompted me to write this, it might be interesting for anyone out there who uses this company.
HMG are a paints firm, they supply a variety of paint products as well as powder etc, we have over twenty years trading history with them in one guise or another so they do know us. HMG Andover are apparently just an agent for HMG which i didn’t know until recently.
I’ll try to make this as condensed as I can – this converstaion played out over a couple of days! We phoned to place an order which was refused, they told us we owed them money, when we questioned this, they told us we didn’t owe them money but our account had been closed (without telling us) , slightly bewildered, we asked for an explanation, which was not easily forthcoming.
After badgering them on this (and we had an urgent order to place), they said they didn’t want to deal with us because we had returned to them some while ago, a box of contaminated powder, which was true. Rather outraged, we contacted HMG head office and asked a representative to look into this for us. The chap phoned me back saying that Andover had said we were ‘problem’ customers and that we had complained on lots of paint orders. Then they said we were always late paying. Unfortunately for them, we could prove that this wasn’t true but they still refused to deal with us whilst accusing us of all sorts.
The fact is, over twenty years of trading, we had only two occassions where we had to ask for a replacement for a faulty product – hardly problem customers. The HMG rep admitted to me that he suspected they had closed the account purely because we weren’t big enough customers for them, which makes more sense, but not once did they admit that, instead they accused us of things we hadn’t done, and funnily enough, they could provide no evidence of either!
So you can imagine how outraged we were over this episode. In all my years in business I have never suffered customer service like this, it was absolutely shocking. I have told HMG that I will advise everyone I know to not use them, and that I would post the same on every internet forum that I could. They were of course, less than pleased to hear that…
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2 Replies
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Write a stern letter to the managing director and any other high up contact e-mail you can get a hold of, and any trade magazines too! 😀
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quote Fred Mc:Write a stern letter to the managing director and any other high up contact e-mail you can get a hold of, and any trade magazines too! 😀Hi Fred,
Yes, I did consider this, trouble is, the guy at Andover who cancelled our account, is the son of the major shareholder of that company so I can’t get past him really, and HMG themselves have said they can’t pull them up either because they don’t have any say in the way Andover is run, they just sell their product through them etc, so the problem is coming right from the top so I don’t think we’ll ever change it or get an apology, and they won’t re-open the account.
The only action people like ourselves can take against this type of treatment is to be vocal about it and hope they lose some sales from it.
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