What to do after receiving bad home service
Being a homeowner can be stressful, especially when you are buying a house in the Greater Vancouver area and it is the most significant investment, and like any other investment, you do not want it to lose value.
Maintaining a house can be very demanding, time and energy-consuming. In some cases, when a task is over your technical skillset, you might want to delegate and let a professional deal with it.
Hiring a company or tradesman can be a stressful and daunting task. You have to do your research and shop around, read reviews and ask neighbours.
After making up your mind, you need to decide and hope you made the right decision.
Saturated market
Let’s face it. If there is money to be made in any field, there will be individuals who would do anything to take your hard-earned money.
Like everything in life, there is the good and the bad, knowledgeable technician and some who are just faking it and providing a temporary patch and not a solution.
If a particular niche is saturated, there is a bigger chance of getting yourself into a lousy experience.
Some companies or individuals would even go the extra length and get fake reviews, advertise low prices and bait you in. Or, in the worse case, won’t even solve your problem but will still charge you.
But you were here only for five minutes!
In the service industry, the following sentence, “But you were here only for five minutes,” has a lot of weight to it. A customer who only sees their end might seem to pay 65-120$ only for a service call that might end in several minutes.
So how come the service price is so high?
To answer this question, I will have to break down the costs of having a professional technician to your doorstep.
Overhead: A company would have either an office or a storage/warehouse
Payroll: Dispatcher, office coordinator and warehouse employees are all in the back-end to make sure the tech will get to your doorstep with all the parts needed
Insurance: General liability insurance, workers comp
Advertising: If the market is saturated, the costs of advertising can skyrocket!
Also, there are tech travel time, gas and much more expenses that are involved in just getting the tech to your doorstep
The bottom line was the problem fixed and what is the quality of the repair or installation and the service
Quality and the technical aspect of the service
In the last paragraph, I covered the costs involved to get a technician to your doorstep; now I will cover the service’s quality aspect.
The rates of the company can be on the higher or lower end, you could pay for high-end service or high-end parts, or sometimes just for an emergency callout.
But when it comes to quality, it should be consistent and par with industry standards whatever the industry is let be garage doors, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, or entry systems.
The standard is the same, but technicians are different no matter what a company will advertise or what they will tell you over the phone, every company has the good techs and the not so good ones.
Sometimes even the good techs can have a long day or bad one. If you happen to get the wrong or low-quality service in most cases, it will not be the company’s indicator and just a single case, and the company will compensate you for the poor expirience if they stand behind their customers.
But to put the company to the test you should call and ask for an additional service when it is under warranty, when it is in the warranty period this is a callback.
A good company will stand behind a bad technician or bad service. On the other hand, some will make excuses and will try to “void” the warranty.
The verdict
Bad service happens and will happen, but don’t be quick to put the hammer down, most companies will try to solve a hairy situation and fix their mistakes or the mistakes of their employees.
Try to stick to an established company and avoid the new player that is lowballing an industry, he might be gone when you need him.
