PorthouseDean Structural Engineers Omdömen 

Svar från PorthouseDean Structural Engineers

28 juni 2023

Thanks Bryan, I'll pass on to Justyna. She'll appreciate it!

Svar från PorthouseDean Structural Engineers

28 juni 2023

Hi John, thank your for taking the time to leave a review. It's always been a pleasure to work with you and we hope to continue doing so for the foreseeable.

Cheers, Sam

Svar från PorthouseDean Structural Engineers

24 maj 2023

Hi Milan, we're really sorry that you were having trouble understanding your document. It would be great to know what it was that you found difficult so that we can understand an how we might improve, so I will ask your project coordinator to contact you for some more detailed feedback on that. Generally, however, the feedback we receive regarding our documents is overwhelmingly positive, so perhaps there was something particularly complex on your project which was tricky to represent diagramatically.

Of course, it is challenging to convey complex technical information, and it can be difficult to understand. That's why why we have our team on-hand to support you through the process. It looks like you took advantage of that, and hopefully it was satisfactory for you. On that note, if you are still having problems, do reach out to your project coordinator who should be able to assist.

Thanks for your feedback, and all the best with your project.

Svar från PorthouseDean Structural Engineers

Uppdaterad 20 mars 2023

Hi Nick, thanks very much for your feedback.

This thing with the messages is something that we've heard people mention before, but I think people's experience varies depending on their email application and how they use it... For example, nowadays Gmail actually cuts off the email trail sent along with a reply at the bottom of each message, and instead shows each original message one below the other as a kind of trail / conversation. Similarly, Outlook has an option for the messages under the "View" menu to "Show as conversations". What this does is it then allows you to flick between each message in chronological order (in a similar way that Gmail does) which makes things a bit tidier, meaning you shouldn't have to scroll down endlessly to see a message you're looking for.

As email apps inevitably improve I feel that the email trail being sent along with the reply will become less of a necessity moving forwards. That said, I will take another look at this, because if our email software can also remove from our view the email trail in the same way that Google does then it may pose less of a problem for us internally.

I hope I've understood your meaning correctly. If I've misunderstood please reach out if you have a spare moment. Thanks again for your feedback

Regards, Sam Dean

Svar från PorthouseDean Structural Engineers

7 dec. 2022

Hi Om, thanks for your review. Obviously, it's disappointing to receive this feedback at our end, and we're sorry that our performance didn't meet your expectations. I understand that we haven't spoken about this yet, and I'd like to hear more about your experience. For the moment, though, I can't really leave this review hanging in case people see this when deciding whether to "hit the button" with us or not.

Firstly, looking at all the correspondence we had with you I'm surprised by the strength of your feeling. The communications you had with your "Responsible Engineer" were cordial and collaborative, and they remained a consistent point of contact with you throughout - so I'm not sure why you think the service was faceless. When you asked us to review the updated architectural design to try to reduce costs, your Responsible Engineer worked with you to try to achieve this goal, and we updated the document for free within a few days of your request.

The expedited service:- In your quote we estimated a turnaround (time spent with us) for the expedited service of roughly 10 working days. Looking at our stats, we delivered it in just over 8 days.

We were extremely difficult to get hold of:- According to the email trails we sent out about 35 emails. In your first body of work (the priority project) our average response time we have from our data was about 4.5 hours. I did a "sanity check" on this by going through the messages, and this looked about right. Our response time for your next job (not a priority project) was 9.5 hours, which is slightly above our target of 8 hours. It does seem you had some difficulty in calling your "Responsible engineer" and some of your calls went to their voicemail. Apologies for that. Sadly, this does happen sometimes when the engineer is away from their desk, on the phone, or in a meeting, but again, it looks like we invariably responded fairly quickly in most cases.

The builders were unhappy:- This is something that isn't unheard of, because we do ask the builders to do things that they don't want to do sometimes, but I hope you understand that that is our prerogative as engineers. I'd think that's what most homeowners would want from their engineer. It's ultimately our job to make sure structures work, and so we prioritise that over trying to make the builder happy (though we ideally want to that, too).

The beams were unnecessary:- It's true that there may be instances where, with further time made available, value improvements can be made. I have questioned the engineers about their layout, and they stand by their reasoning for it. There are usually more efficient approaches, however we do have to consider competing factors such as timeframes, which often do come into play. Ostensibly, this was important to you, because you raised the issue several times in correspondence. If you did want us to review some of the beams, then we would have been happy to do that, but we never received this request (presumably because time was pressing).

A junior consultant works on the project:- It's true that junior staff contribute to projects as much as possible, and that work is signed-off by more senior staff. I'm not sure that is particularly controversial. It's more efficient involving them at certain points than having senior staff do all of the work. Regarding our price, we don't say who will be working on a project at pricing stage. We just quote a price and then do the work for that price. I'm sorry if that wasn't made clear.

In summary, we're sorry that our service didn't meet what you expected. With so many competing interests, and factors to consider in the work that we do, it is inevitable that this will happen from time-to-time. The important thing is that we learn how we might do things better, and that is why I look forward to hearing from you about the gap between what you were expecting, and what we did. Apologies again from me, and on behalf of our team.

Regards, Sam Dean

Svar från PorthouseDean Structural Engineers

25 okt. 2022

Hi Mark, thanks for taking the time to leave a review. We can only apologise if you found the experience unsatisfactory. We understand that it must be frustrating to have a construction project take longer than you would hope, but that said, I don't believe that a 1-star review is a fair reflection of our company (as shown by our other overwhelmingly positive reviews).

When I shared your review with Saleh he was quite saddened by it, because he (like all of us) wants to do a good job, and always tries hard to achieve that. I'm not sure that it is appropriate to single him out. Criticism should be directed at us as a company and not him as an individual. He is good engineer and employee.

Looking at our statistics for your dealings with Saleh, on average he appears to have responded within 7.14 hours, which is below our target of 8 hours. I can see that there were some instances where Saleh took a few days to respond, which is not as good as we would hope, and I have asked Saleh to look into this to see what he might be able to do to differently. Regarding the phone calls, I can see that Saleh has mostly reverted to communicating with you via email, and perhaps that was perceived as not being proactive enough, so maybe that is something also to be looked at.

I can see we had some IT-related problems because your emails were only coming through with the signature and no content or body, which lengthened the discussions. I'm not sure why that would have happened, and also I'm not sure why your emails weren't coming through as replies to other emails, and instead kept creating duplicate threads. This type of thing usually causes inefficiencies at our end; which can contribute to delayed responses if they don't get assigned to the right person quickly enough.

Regarding the standard of Saleh's communication, we haven't had similar feedback from other customers about that, and around the office and in general we all find Saleh to be a good communicator. I do hope you acknowledge that communication is a two-way street, and that the person communicating a message is as important as the person receiving it to the accurate transfer of information.

I don't think that it is reasonable to blame any and all delays on us; looking at the many emails and queries which came back to us it wasn't just one query. It's important to note that our documents are standardized, and yours is probably an outlier in the number of queries received. There are many parties responsible for delivering a construction project on time, and we are only a relatively small part of that process. There are many documents that we issue where the builder just cracks on and makes construction-related decisions (i.e. ones unrelated to calculations) themselves, or in concert with the BCO, and this minimises delays.

Apologies that you weren't always responded to as quickly as we or you would like. When we get feedback like this it is often from homeowners who maybe don't know what we do or what to expect as a service, and we are constantly working to communicate what people should expect. We perhaps need to do more in that area. Construction projects, particularly when working on existing structures, can take longer than expected because you sometimes find things that couldn't have been foreseen. That doesn't mean to say, however, that we can't do better, so please be assured that your feedback will lead to changes within our organisation for the better to try and prevent this from happening again.

We do hope you will reconsider the one star review. As far as I can see we have fulfilled our obligations, provided you with a quote for calculations (which didn't change), and provided design calculations and solutions which enabled you to complete your project. Whilst it didn't meet your expectations on customer service, we did communicate with you to answer queries and get things moving for you. I don't believe that that is one star.