Honesty is the Best Policy

Checkaprofessional.com is an online monitoring service that builds confidence between professional services and their customers. Being transparent is key to building trust, and customer trust in turn builds a good reputation.

Whilst word of mouth is still a powerful marketing tool for many businesses, there’s only so far you take a good reputation based on your friends’ and family’s high praises. Reputation is everything in business, and you don’t build a good one overnight; it takes time for your services to be trusted across communities, to be recommended amongst consumers or clients and, most importantly to keep that reputation in the long-term.

Difficulties for professional services include being unable to determine your reputation and instilling confidence in your customer base about your service being the right one for them. The main difficulty that customers have, in turn, is having that confidence in the service they choose, and knowing they’ve got the best price possible without shopping around for hours on end.

Run by the award-winning reliable trade search platform Checkatrade, Checkaprofessional.com is an online monitoring service, which aims to provide the solution to these problems, for both business and consumer. It publishes verified client feedback for the professional services sector and allows customers to search an independent and impartial database of trustworthy professionals in their area and give verified client feedback.

Choosing a service based on recommendations from friends, colleagues and family, however reliable, doesn’t give much room for consumers to shop around or invest in the services of new providers. Equally, they have no way of knowing if another service would do the same job better, which can then lead to disappointment and a complaint. A recent consumer survey by the UK’s primary competition and consumer authority, Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) found that only 22% of consumers had compared 2 or more providers when choosing a legal adviser. It’s not just a question of quality either, with consumers often paying far more than they need to.

The way that buyers and sellers – customers and professional services – interact has changed dramatically over the past decade. With the growth of all things digital, more and more information can be shared, seen and spread online, and as so many business are now solely online, customers have had to go about purchasing services in a very different way.

As such, there has been a huge growth in digital feedback tools, online comparison sites, aggregator sites, tracking services and discussion platforms, but as with the internet as a whole, buyers have to be more careful than ever with what they read and believe online.

Aggregator sites that deal with prices, along with policy details, are often seen a great way of finding a service at a competitive price. Insurance for many, can be purchased begrudgingly, often settling for a policy that’s hoped will be adequate. Aggregator sites are well visited, easy to use and a good way for prospective clients to view a multitude of companies and purchase a policy without ever having to pick up the phone – a great sales tool, alongside the insurers own website.

Some prospective clients visit an aggregator site just to find the cheapest quote. This then begs the question, how do you stand out from the crowd? How can you, as a service provider, educate prospective clients that it’s not all about the price of the policy, but encourage them to take a look at the cover provided and equally as important, to have the availability to review service provided by the claims department, should their services be called for?

The true worth of any company comes at the customer’s time of need, for example when the insurance purchaser needs to make a claim. Quality of service at this time is what makes all the difference, and is what will build that all-important reputation.

A recent survey by KPMG found that UK small businesses value their reputation as one of their key assets and, as such, this is an asset you must firstly protect and secondly build upon. Professional services could of course rely on traditional word of mouth, but this takes time and a lot of ‘what ifs’ and some companies can get complacent. So keeping a watchful eye through client feedback would help make sure they are maintaining the reputation they have worked so hard to obtain.

Once validated on the Checkaprofessional database, the business builds a score for all potential customers to see, beginning that valuable process of good reputation building. The spread of untrustworthy advice, reviews or information on a company’s service is not fair to either the business or the customer. Checkaprofessional.com is an ideal way of demonstrating to a huge range of potential and existing customers that your service is reliable, trustworthy and of high quality.

It is imperative that your customers be allowed to check a professional with absolute confidence, so with Checkaprofessional.com, your potential consumers can be sure that they’re choosing a high quality, trustworthy and efficient service, whilst professionals can be sure they’re reputation stays in tact and that any potential customers that are looking will be able to easily find them.

Let us help you build, or maintain your reputation. Contact us free on: 0800 093 8414, or email us info@Checkaprofessional.com

See what our members say and take a look at their profiles…

Tom Millin, Fluent Architectural Design Services

http://www.checkaprofessional.com/FluentArchitecturalDesignServ/

“Since signing up to check-a-pro we have taken on two new staff and have also just put out two new adverts to help us with the expanding workload. We currently don’t advertise anywhere else apart from on this site and are inundated with enquiries.”

The Bureau EG Ltd.

http://www.checkaprofessional.com/TheBureauEg/

“Selecting a good website design and marketing company is difficult at the best of times so having a sort of comparison site to help you choose makes a lot of sense. Having our existing clients help convince prospective ones that we deliver great designs, value for money and good service through their feedback have proved invaluable and the reason we joined Checkaprofessional last year.”