Customer Experience : Mr & Mrs Price, Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire

We visited Mr & Mr Price who bought their kitchen some four years ago from Simple Kitchens. We revisited their journey and took the opportunity to find out about the test of time.

Question
What was the situation before your new kitchen?

Mrs Price:
So before we had our new kitchen we’d lived in this house for about 30 years. We had replaced the kitchen that was here when we arrived, but, we hadn’t had a new kitchen for probably about 27 years. It was getting….it was a nice kitchen we liked it, but it was difficult to clean. We had seen other people’s kitchens with these big drawers you can pull out and put things in. And we talked about it for several years, actually, before we actually got to the point where we thought, yes, let’s try a new trick… A new kitchen.

Mr Price:
We finally decided that it was time to really embrace the idea, partly because we had the fridge in our utility room and kept tripping over the step to get to it, and it therefore felt like that was the right time to go ahead and actually find someone to design things that perhaps fitted a little bit better than the way we had it set before.

Mrs Price:
My husband takes a long time to make up his mind about anything.

Mr Price:
If it involves spending money, yes.

Question:
What problem were you trying to solve with your new kitchen?

Mrs Price:
Well, what I wanted from a new kitchen was something bright, modern, easy to clean, having some of the new features because ours was rather old fashioned. It was old oak wood units which got very greasy and very difficult to clean. And as my husband has said, we wanted to get the fridge out of the utility room. And another thing that we wanted, well, we didn’t know we wanted until Thomas came along, was a sink in our utility room.

Mr Price:
Where the fridge had been.

Question:
What was important to you in buying your new kitchen?

Mr Price:
What was important? Well, we’ve said something that really worked, incorporated all the things that we were looking for in terms of storage, made the most of not the easiest space given the bits that had been added onto the house that didn’t necessarily make the kitchen particularly usable, and then somebody who could really look at it and come up with ideas that we wouldn’t necessarily have thought of ourselves but that worked.

Question:
Where did you start the Search for your new kitchen?

Mr Price:
Where did we start our search? As far as I remember it was on the Internet. We’d have looked in the Crendon Crier, the local rag, probably in the Thame Gazette at that time, which was still in existence, but I’m fairly sure it was the Internet that we started getting the ideas from and came down with what did we talk two or three people.

Mrs Price:
Two. Yes. We spoke to two kitchen designers who came here. Thomas (Simple Kitchens) was the first one and he had really good, um, feedback on the site that Mike looked at, so we thought that sounds good. And we also saw somebody else afterwards

Mr Price:
Who we shall not name because they didn’t get the business.

Question:
How did they compare to the other supplier in this case, what was it that helpedSimple Kitchens stand out from the competitor?

Mrs Price:
What stood out about Thomas when he came here was that he listened, he really listened to what we wanted. And he’s a very nice guy and….

Mr Price:
He had a nice ponytail at the time.

Mrs Price:

He did have a nice ponytail. He, he made me feel confident that he was going to do a good job

Mr Price:
And the other guy came and had similar discussions with us. And then the interesting thing is when we came down to making decisions, at least where should we go to have the final discussions and get people to start putting all the work in for final design and everything else. Thomas came up with something which we hardly needed to tweak at all, it really fitted. And the other guy we were talking to either hadn’t listened or had a totally different concept to what we were saying because it was not remotely what we had wanted. And so the decision was quite simple to make.

Mrs Price:
Very easy decision.

Question:
What features sold you on buying from Simple Kitchens?

Mr Price:
So the question really is, what made us make the final decision to go withSimple Kitchens? And that was the whole way the service worked, wasn’t it, the whole way the design worked?

Mrs Price:
Yes. We liked the design. I loved the idea of having the curved units which leads out into a part of our kitchen, which is a very odd shape and it makes a very smooth transition from one side to the other. And then just the whole way it was shown to us, the graphics that Christina did for us that looked like a kitchen already done, and could be tweaked and then she would send it back with more pictures of the kitchen. The fact that Thomas had put together a whole spreadsheet of what was going to be done when, we could hardly believe that was going to happen like that, but it did. And so in terms of what we felt afterwards, we would recommend to anybody that Thomas is so well organised.

Mr Price:
The only thing he couldn’t manage was to give Carol a spreadsheet afterwards that kept me in line with what she wanted, but apparently it doesn’t work like that.

Mrs Price:
No more jokes!

Question:
And so on a score of one to 10 with 10 being very important, would you please score how important were the following in your buying decision and ultimate satisfaction? So the first one is ‘the new kitchen meeting your requirements’?

Mrs Price:
Oh, well I believe if I was scoring how much we would giveSimple Kitchens for meeting our requirements, it would have to be a 10. I don’t go in for 110%.

Question:
And your score for design?

Mrs Price:
Um, for design, I would also score a 10.

Mr Price:
10, 10 would be absolutely right.

Mrs Price:
I’ve loved the kitchen

Question:
Sticking to your budget?

Mrs Price:
Ah!

Mr Price:
Carol would give them a 10. I’d give them like one and a half.

Mrs Price:
And your score for sticking to the budget…?

Mr Price:
But then my budget was a lot less generous than Carol’s.

Mrs Price:
Yes. Actually I think Thomas stuck to the budget.

Mr Price:
He did. Yes.

Question
And your score for ‘Reputation’?

Mrs Price:
How much would we score Thomas for his reputation? Everybody that we know who has had a kitchen from Thomas would have scored him a 10. And the people that we recommended him to also score him 10. So it has to be another 10.

Question
And your score for the quality of the workmanship?

Mrs Price:
The workmanship was excellent. All of the people who worked for Thomas on our kitchen worked to a high quality and turned up on time, which I don’t think everybody who has a kitchen done has that experience. And were really nice chaps as well. So yes, another 10.

Mr Price:
And Thomas came back and checked everything and often couldn’t find anything to complain about.

Question:
The last score is for the ‘single point of contact from beginning to end’?

Mrs Price:
Thomas was wonderful from beginning to end. He was here at the end of most days. Some days he stayed for quite a while with his checklists, just checking out everything. And so we always knew that we could rely on seeing him most days anyway. I don’t think we ever had to ring up and chase him up. Everything happened when it was supposed to happen, unless there was a very, very good reason.

Question
How did you find the design process around your new kitchen?

Mr Price:
What was the design process like is really very easy to answer. It was absolutely super, because it all happened and Thomas came, he gave us an outline design to start off with, and then it was refined. Then it was refined, but the pictures, the graphics made it so easy to see how it was going to look in our kitchen. And it all came out and looked exactly like the pictures.

Mrs Price:
The different appliances like our cooker hoods and other appliances, the corner unit things, so with pictures of them, so we knew exactly what our kitchen was going to have in it.

Mr Price
Yup. Brilliant.

Question
How did you find the experience around the removal of your old kitchen and the installation of your new one?

Mrs Price:
I think we went away for a holiday at the beginning of the installation. So I think we were out of the way for the removal of the old kitchen

Mr Price:
Which helped,

Mrs Price:
Which helped a lot. Once we got back, obviously we couldn’t use the kitchen. So Thomas was very good about bringing us a portable cooker that we could have in our dining room. And a big water thing when we didn’t have any water for a while and very quickly got the Belfast sink in the utility room done so that we could have water for washing up. And really, we didn’t find it a problem at all. I mean, we’re very glad when the kitchen was finished.

Mr Price:
We weren’t enthusiastic about carrying on for too long without the kitchen.

Question
What made you happiest about your new kitchen?

Mr Price:
How long have we got to tell you about all the favourite features we’ve got? It’s a very good question.

Mrs Price:
Yes. Well, well we love the design. I love the big drawers for putting sort of crockery and pans and things in, it’s so much easier to use for somebody my age who’s not as bendy as she used to be. And I think I mentioned earlier the curved cupboards going through….it looks and is safer than having pointy edges to the cupboards. We love the ‘pull-out’ and ‘swing-round’ magic corners. That’s right. We’ve got three of them in this kitchen and they are excellent. We also like the Tambour unit which is so much easier to use in a space that you couldn’t have a door on because you can just slide it up.

Mr Price:
The food mixer lives in there and just comes out and works. And the Belfast sink.

Mrs Price:
Oh and the Belfast sink.

Mr Price:
So Carol can wash all her pots from the garden now without getting the kitchen all mucky. Very useful.

Mrs Price:
Yeah.

Question
How did you find the team of installers and joiners?

Mrs Price:
We met the team before everything started, they all came along to measure up and be introduced Every single one of them was friendly, uh, punctual, loved having lots of cups of tea, and their workmanship seemed to be wonderful.

Question
How did you find the communications withSimple Kitchens and the single point of contact?

Mr Price:
The communications we had all the way through with Thomas, with Simple Kitchens ….basically it was really good that Thomas was the point of contact, so we didn’t have to chase up other people to get the plumber to come and do bits or when is the electrician coming? It all got slotted in and as we’d said earlier on, Thomas had done a spreadsheet on who was going to do what, when, and virtually all of it happened. A couple of odd things simply because something was found that was different and therefore it had to be modified. But otherwise, everything went absolutely bang on the program.

Mrs Price:
Even if Thomas thinks it didn’t.

Question
What about your experience withSimple Kitchens made you happiest?

Mrs Price:
Thomas, he made us happiest. The fact that everything worked. It worked beautifully. And as I said before, we did have experience of other people having kitchens done at the same time who were tearing their hair out. We were very happy to recommend Thomas and two of our friends took us up on contacting him. And have been very pleased with their kitchens.

Mr Price:
And when you think about it, the kitchen is probably one of the most difficult places to manage without. So if you have somebody coming in doing it that does not get things done when they say they’re going to get them done, you end up with weeks of not being able to use your kitchen, that’s a real, real hassle.

Question
How did you new kitchen transform your home?

Mr Price:
How has our new kitchen transformed our home Carol? It’s made it very nice to be out here and just enjoy being in it. And it works so well doesn’t it?

Mrs Price:
Yes, it does work really well. And we’ve already talked about the fact that it’s much easier to use than our old kitchen. And, and it looks so good. We feel really proud of it.

Mr Price:
I think everyone who’s seen the kitchen since we had it done has been most impressed with the way it looks, haven’t they?

Mrs Price:
Yes they have.

Mr Price:
I’m not sure the children are impressed. Mainly because as far as the children are concerned, we should have pulled that wall out to have a single room with the dining room and not have the nice hatch, which is useful for passing stuff through. But then that’s what children are like, isn’t it? They are different.

Mrs Price:
Grown up children we’re talking about.

Mr Price:
No, that’s true. They are grown up children.

Question
How did you find the quality of the kitchen?

Mrs Price:
The quality of the new kitchen is, is excellent. I mean, we haven’t managed to break it much. Uh, and it, it still looks as good as when Thomas put it in, I think.

Mr Price:
Yes it does.

Mrs Price:
And I would quite happily pay the money again if we needed a new kitchen, but I don’t think that’s going to happen in my lifetime.

Mr Price:
That’s a minority view.

Question
DidSimple Kitchens deliver on your expectations?

Mrs Price:
I think my expectations were…met and then some working withSimple Kitchens. I was absolutely amazed at how it all fitted together. How he kept to the plan, but at the same time being flexible. So if something wasn’t working quite right, or we changed our minds once or twice, he just, it seemed like it was water off a duck’s back with him. Um, may not have been inside. He may have been running along with little legs, but we were delighted, delighted with the way things went.

Mr Price:
Yeah, I think, and I think that’s, that’s exactly it. It was having heard so many horror stories from other people who’d had problems. It was just lovely the way that everything did work and got slotted in, in the timeframe that we were expecting.

Question
Would you be happy to continue to recommendSimple Kitchens?

Mr Price:
So we’ve, we would be very happy and are very happy to keep recommendingSimple Kitchens for other people, aren’t we? Because of both the way that it worked out for us and just the whole quality of everything that happened.

Mrs Price:
And the personal service that Thomas himself and Christina gives that you feel like you’re working with real people, who are concerned and show as much care for your kitchen as if it was their own.

Mrs Price:
Well, we’ve had this kitchen now for four years and it makes me as happy now as it did when it was built. I love it.

Mr Price:
You still get a real buzz, don’t you?

Mrs Price:
Yes.

Mr Price:
And I do. Especially after Carol’s given it a nice clean.

Question
If someone was thinking of buying a new kitchen, what advice would you give them?

Mrs Price:
If someone was interested in buying fromSimple Kitchens or thought that they might be, I would advise them to do what we did, which is we went to see some people who had already had a kitchen built and got a first-hand account of how it had been for them. And we’ve also invited friends around here whilst it was going on and just after it finished. And just the way that we talk about it got at least two friends to buy it.

Mr Price:
And also get Thomas to come and talk to you in your kitchen about what you might want because he’s so full of ideas.

Question
On hindsight, is there anything you’d have done differently or would advise Simple- Kitchens?

Mr Price:
Concluding, I don’t think there is anything that we would have done differently. We’ve been so happy with the whole way that it worked. The odd time that we had one little problem with the sink and Thomas had a spare bit sitting in his bag. ‘Oh here you are, that’s what you need’ with just the…waste trap. So everything’s there. It’s the support, the enthusiasm, the genuine interest in making sure that it’s exactly what we wanted. And I say four years on now, it’s still exactly what we wanted, isn’t it?

Mrs Price:
It is. It is.

Thank you

A big thank you fromSimple Kitchens to Mr & Mrs Green and Mr & Mrs Price for their open and kind commentary. We hope you found that helpful.