We are often asked if we are a national company or a franchise of a national brand; we are not. Heat and Home is an independent company established in Medway in early 2008.
The company was set up under a single over arching principle and that is to be really good at what we do.
Our own past experience of employing all local trades, not just plumbers and heating engineers, had lead to some very low expectations on the sort of service we’d expect to receive: phone calls unanswered, jobs unfinished, messages unreturned, faint ideas of cost, endless chasing for that quote to come back.
This is a common story and so is it any wonder that heating customers in their tens of thousands turn to the likes of British Gas, npower, the AA or their own boiler manufacturer for annual cover? At the very least, the customer’s phone call will be answered, an engineer will come when booked and there is some recourse if you are unhappy with any aspect of the service.
We wanted to give customers the confidence to use a local company by offering great customer service and accountability when things go wrong, but we wanted to go one better than our national counterparts. We wanted the service to be personal, convenient and to better the expectations of our customers. For this reason we offer two to four hour time slots, phone calls ahead of time, fixed pricing for the majority of our services, free advice on heating basics and a commitment to always get customers up and running in the short term, where possible.
None of this is relevant however if we are not able to deliver the very highest technical expertise. Many ex-customers of national companies complain to us of the inconsistent technical ability of the engineers that come. Some are very good, others are recently qualified and not in a position to deal with the complexities of boilers breakdowns.
Heat & Home was founded with one, outstanding, breakdown engineer, so we knew our technical services were consistently high and that has won us work and lead to an ever growing pool of loyal customers.
However, demand for our services has increased and our geographic area extended so that we now have several qualified engineers. Our greatest concern in expanding is any dilution of our technical expertise and it was paramount that we found people that met our criteria for methodical, intelligent and competent engineers.
Our aims are to continue to grow, but without diluting any of our founding principles. Not an easy task, but one we continually strive to meet.
