Finding Reputable Tradespeople: Is it Still About Word of Mouth?
There’s no question that the internet has changed nearly every aspect of our lives. And while you can’t get Google to fix your plumbing, replace your headlight or move you across the country (yet), an internet search is the first stop for many when it comes to finding reputable tradespeople to hire.
Peter Moorhouse, president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) serving the Atlantic provinces, says that there are three places he sees people searching for skilled, trustworthy tradespeople: BBB itself, social media and other rating sites. He explains that BBB has had to adapt to an age of much more readily available information.
“If you rewind the clocks maybe 20 years ago before the widespread advent of the internet and all the company pages and social media as well, BBB at that time was really the only source of information, not just to find businesses, you could go to Yellow Pages for that, but to find information about businesses,” Moorhouse says.
Moorhouse says people would have gotten their information from BBB by making a phone call or even sending a letter and waiting for a reply before deciding if a tradesperson or business they were considering was worth hiring.
This is hard to imagine now when reputations can be decimated at the click of the post button on Facebook. Reputations seem a lot more unstable with social media around to force businesses to be accountable for the experiences of every customer or client who might feel like taking their out frustrations online.
Moorhouse says this means that businesses have to be on top of addressing customer complaints now more than ever. This is especially important for BBB since their ratings are determined by an algorithm that starts a business off with a perfect score and then deducts based on complaints and whether or not they are addressed by the business. These ratings are available to see any time on their website.
“Social media is posing some new risks for businesses because people with grudges will sometimes take to social media and will air their grievances about a business and unless they’ve actually flagged that business’s Facebook account or Twitter feed, we’ve had situations where people have been saying very negative, very detrimental, critical things about a business on social media and the business doesn’t find out about it until it’s too late, the damage has already been done,” Moorhouse says.
Any smart businessperson or tradesperson recognizes this and considers addressing customer complaints and concerns crucial to the success of their business. Darcy Friars owns Arc Electric, a small electrical contracting company in Fredericton with an A+ rating on Better Business Bureau. Friars says that reputation is absolutely everything.
“If you don’t have a good reputation, you don’t have any work,” Friars says. “Especially for a smaller contractor, I find reputation is just critical.”
Friars says he faces customer concerns as much as anyone else and that repairing anything recently installed that might not be working properly without charging the client is just a part of doing business.
“I could buy a brand new outside light, I could put it up and it could fail … You’re not going to go back to your customer for additional labour to change that fixture. You’re just going to handle it, get it done. You sold them the part, you want to make sure it’s working for them,” Friars says.
“You just do it, you don’t charge for it. It’s just part of the service … Once you get a client, get someone to try you out or you go in, you convince someone that you’re going to do the job for them, you’ve got to stand behind it. And if you don’t, if there was a problem, they’re just not going to use you again. They’re going to go back to whoever they had before. It’s very important to keep customers.”
Friars says that while much of his commercial business comes from word of mouth, his smaller one-time customers find him on Facebook, online or in the Yellow Pages. He says that a good reputation is crucial to getting those word of mouth references.
Fredericton resident Karen Pinchin is very familiar with these kinds of references. Having recently gone through home renovations with contractors, she says she’s learned a lot from the experience.
“We’ve worked with a series of contractors and it’s fairly interesting for us to watch how people find people and pay people and how different the prices are and how different the quality of work can be,” Pinchin says.
After some difficulties with their first contractor, Pinchin says she and her husband now have a much better idea of what to look when they’re hiring tradespeople.
“The thing that I’ve realized with having contractors is that the attention to detail is one of the most valuable things,” Pinchin says. “A lot of contractors can rip it out, put up the drywall, they can do the major projects but [there are] contractors that leave all the little detail work just not done and then leave you hanging and then they go off to do another job.”
Pinchin says that if she could do things over again, she would have trusted her gut at the first sign of trouble and done more research. Her advice to anyone looking to hire trustworthy tradespeople is to get referrals from tradespeople you already trust and ask for references.
“I would say ask for references … Asking for references can feel so awkward. Like, ‘show me your things’ just feels incredibly weird,” she says. “But when you do ask for references, we found that the people who have good references are very happy to share them and very willing to let you see other projects they worked on.”
Another Fredericton resident, Mark Cameron, combined internet research with word of mouth references from friends and family when he recently hired a heat pump installer. He found two that impressed him the most.
“I ended up going with the company that has recently installed a unit at a friend’s house,” he says. “I am so far happy with the service. I also had a new roof put on recently and that was sort of the same thing. I checked a combo of online reviews and friend reviews and got quotes from a number of companies. I eventually went with my gut and good word of mouth.”
While many people may turn to online sources to find tradespeople for hire, it’s clear that old fashioned word of mouth is still alive and kicking.
“People are certainly reaching out to their family and friends for those kinds of referrals,” Peter Moorhouse says. “It’s the same thing that people have always done, it’s just now there’s a different channel to do it, a broader channel instead of just calling your uncle or aunt. You can put it out to all your friends and family all at the same time.”