Crash and Burn: An Abbreviated History of Find-a-Contractor Sites
Why is it so hard to find a contractor or other type of home improvement company?
The stock advice is: "Ask thy neighbor." The stock answer is: "But if I had a neighbor to ask, I wouldn't be asking you for advice."
Online find-a-contractor sites pop up as frequently as dandelions; and like dandelions, *poof* they go and the wind whisks them away. Some of my brushes with them are:
- Some guy with something called Project Turtle spammed my site. But because the idea intrigued me, I wrote up a review (what a sucker I was). Today, Project Turtle has all of 1 job posted on it.
- Fixr - Another contractor matching site. I've had discussions with this guy--Andres Torrubia--and his heart and mind are in the right place. Fixr began strong, but it still seems lodged in a small region of the U.S. Northeast. Update 10/30/09: I received an update on the status of Fixr from Andres Torrubia. Fixr is still going strong and is expanding throughout the U.S., beyond its initial East Coast origins. This is evidenced by Fixr's new contractor directory. A check proves that Fixr even has contractors in my neck of the woods, Washington State.
- ServiceMagic - Oh boy. Don't get me started about ServiceMagic: all over the Web, but this does not translate to "well-loved." My #1 e-mail complaint from readers concerns ServiceMagic. And my #1 complaint from contractors is...ServiceMagic. Contractors say the leads are expensive and bad. Consumers question ServiceMagic's screening process.
- RipOffReport - Obviously, you're only going to get bad reviews of contractors here. What about the good ones?
- Angie's List - Not a bad site, but who wants to pay for this service? I just wanted to get a referral for one plumber to fix my toilet; now I've got my credit card down for a recurring, monthly payments. Gee, thanks Angie. I'm now stuck with you for life? Makes me want to sing those lyrics from the Rolling Stones song, Angie, which go: "Angie, you're beautiful, but ain't it time we said good-bye?"
So, the other day at the Seattle Home Show 2, I talked to a guy named Dave Richards of HelpHive.com who is starting a new referral/recommendation site (still mainly in the Pacific Northwest) to connect professonals with consumers. The right thing about this--other than that it's free for consumers--is they appear to be well-funded. This is no guy-in-his-boxer-shorts-in-the-basement kind of startup company.
HelpHive.com has a lot of those warm & fuzzy social networking tones about it--user recommendations, videos, a blog, ratings, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Let's cross our fingers and hope for the best for this company.
Comments
Helphive.com is some new kind of scam website
It exploits businesses and consumers seeking services.
All businesses listed on this supposed consumer directory have a fake phone number substituted for the company’s real phone number. This fake phone number belongs to the owners of Helphive,com . These local business listings are not placed there by the business but have been harvested from other sources. Helphive.com apparently thinks that it is OK to use any company’s name and substitute the real contact information (the company phone number) with another so that they can harvest the incoming information and make money from it in various ways. If it is your misfortune to own a business listed on this site your customer has been hijacked. Helphive claims that they are giving the company listed a “free” ad or listing. Well, it is not a real benefit to any company if they are collecting data and hiding your real phone number from the public. They have no right to use your company name in conjuction with a phone nuber that isn’t yours without your permission.
Businesses Beware! Think about it. Do you really want anybody out there to misdirect your calls to themselves first (for any reason), harvest any information they can get from it, and then (theroretically) forward the call to you? Who needs some unknown greedy unethical corporate jerks screening and recording information regarding your incoming phone calls from your customers? They claim they are forwardingthe calls to the business. Are they really. So what if they are. They didn’t forward mine. I called the supposed phone number they attached to my business listing and it did not ring my phone. It dropped me into a programmed data collection program requesting to know what kind of service I was looking for, when I wanted the service performed etc. The program told me that my company was unavailable and then proceeded to get buying information from me. For what purpose? To sell it to somebody of course. The jerks just stole my customer usingmy name.
The scenario I just described is outright fraud. It is a theft of my reputation, my name and my customer. It is a fraud upon the consumer who thinks they contacted my office looking for a service. They were lied to as we were open and our phones were functional. They had no way to know that the voice machine telling them that we were unavailable wasn’t us telling them that.
Even if they say that they are forwarding the call to your business, how do you know? Even if they do it, as they say for “free”, how about next year? They call you up on your real phone number and try to sell you an “upgrade” to improve your position in their listings or whatever. The phone is your lifeline between your company and the public. Helphive is attempting to wedge themsemselves between the customer and the services you provide. Do we really need a for-profit company screening our incoming calls, harvesting our customer information and then doing as they wish with the customer all the while hiding our phone number from them?
What happens when other online directories harvest information from their site? The possibility exists that that phoney number that everbody thinks is your phone number gets replicated in other websites and directories. When Google searches it matches your company name up with the phoney contact number and then what? How is anybody going to undo that damage to your company when your phone stops ringing because everbody is calling a phoney phone number that has your business name attached to it?
We need a class action lawsuit now to recover damages that we can’t even estimate. If it isn’t illegal to place ads or listings to the public using our company’s name without permission and faking our phone numbers, we need a law now. This behavior is damaging to all businesses listed on their site. In my opinion the activity of Helphive.com is outright criminal in intent. If we can’t call the cops then we file a civil suit.
Contact Helphive.com and demand that they stop using your company name and attaching a phoney telephone number while hiding your real telephone number.
File complaints with the Attorney General, the BBB, and anybody else you can think of.
File a civil suit to stop them from using your good company’s name for their profit without your permission.
Join a class action suit if you can find one.
HelpHive.com is NOT a scam website as Evan Conklin suggests NOR do we exploit business and consumers seeking services.
I’ll avoid using or responding to defamatory and slanderous accusations, and focus on the conveniently missing facts from Evan Conklin’s comments:
1) “They call you up on your real phone number and try to sell you an “upgrade” to improve your position in their listings or whatever”
Yes, we did call Evan Conklin… as a followup to questions Evan Conklin POSTED via our customer service system about how the contact information
on HelpHive works. It was not nor was it intended to be a sales call.
2) “All businesses listed on this supposed consumer directory have a fake phone number substituted for the company’s real phone number. This fake phone number belongs to the owners of Helphive.com.”
Yes, we do have a HelpHive phone number on each business listing. We do this so we can provide a low risk, low cost, performance based model to businesses interested in generating referrals and business from HelpHive. Our business approach is “we get paid when the business is getting paid”. In order to do this, we employ a proxy phone number to track and report to businesses referrals that originated from HelpHive and HelpHive customers. This is not like otherapproaches where evaluating the return on investment can be challenging at best:
- paying a flat, monthly advertising fee to various phonebooks, online directories or other sites where businesses pay regardless of whether they get referrals or jobs
- paying a per lead fee to various offline or online services where businesses pay regardless of the quality of the lead or whether the lead resulted in a job
How a business listing, including contact information, works on HelpHive:
- every business receives a free customizable listing page ; once a business claims their page, a business can provide information about their services, specialties and post work portfolio as well as request customers to post reviews of their work
- the ways a customer can contact a business includes the HelpHive phone number as well as a HelpHive.com text-based messaging system. This phone number directs the phone call to the business’s phone number when in trial mode (all businesses when they are first listed) or businesses who have chosen to signup for the one of our referral plans
- a business that has claimed their page can opt to turn off the HelpHive contact information if they so choose; also a business that has yet to claim their page can request that we turn off their contact information (which we did in the case of Evan Conklin)
3) “They had no way to know that the voice machine telling them that we were unavailable wasn’t us telling them that.”
When a customer calls a business via HelpHive, the first thing they hear is a welcome from HelpHive and then a request to enter the HelpHive extension of the business they are trying to reach.
4) “They claim they are forwarding the calls to the business. Are they really. So what if they are. They didn’t forward mine. I called the supposed phone number they attached to my business listing and it did not ring my phone. It dropped me into a programmed data collection program requesting to know what kind of service I was looking for, when I wanted the service performed etc. The program told me that my company was unavailable and then proceeded to get buying information from me. For what purpose? To sell it to somebody of course.”
In Evan Conklin’s case, the HelpHive phone system encountered their automated phone answering attendant when trying to direct the call to the business; our system treated the automated attendant as an answering machine and as such went into voice message mode. We are resolving the particular issue posed by this case of an automated answering attendant – we expect to have a fix for this on our site this week. All of this was explained to Evan Conklin – and conveniently left out of his comment. Additionally, we DO NOT have a “programmed data collection program” which we sell. This information is collected by our phone system in voice message mode (i.e. when a business doesn’t answer a call originating from HelpHive) for the exclusive and sole purpose of the business being contacted.
5) “Do we really need a for-profit company screening our incoming calls, harvesting our customer information and then doing as they wish with the customer all the while hiding our phone number from them?”
We do NOT screen incoming calls as part of any normal operating process – we do NOT harvest information from a customer for any purpose other than providing that information to the business the customer attempted to contact.
6) On a related note, as part of our normal operating process we review all reviews of businesses posted on HelpHive.com to ensure genuineness and accuracy and to prevent false or shill reviews being posted by businesses themselves (which is in fact a violation of HelpHive.com Terms of Service agreed to by users who post reviews). In going through our normal procedure we found 2 reviews posted on Evan Conklin’s respective businesses dated October 30th by an account setup on HelpHive that very same day. The email address associated with the account that posted the reviews (seattleonly.com) is owned by Evan Conklin. Draw your own conclusion. We have since removed these questionable reviews to protect the integrity of the HelpHive community.