As a contractor, you have a lot of responsibilities. Multiple employees, shifting timelines, various projects, and all of them can get derailed by an act of nature or other events out of your control. This was especially true during the pandemic and upheaval at the USPS, which cost American businesses billions of dollars collectively.
And part of your work is trying to manage the relationship with a customer when things go sideways. Unfortunately, our customers can be demanding and unreasonable, especially at the start of the mediation process. Worse yet, they sometimes take to social media to air their complaints.
One place irate customers can go to register a complaint is the HomeAdvisor.com site.
HomeAdvisor is primarily set up as a marketplace for contractors and handymen to find work close to them, and to help people who need work done to find the people who are qualified to do it. Thousands of people use HomeAdvisor each week to look for work or workers. And it can be a good source of information about how good (or bad) a contractor is at their job.
For this reason, it is important to understand how to manage things when a customer provides a bad rating of your company to HomeAdvisor.com.
Register with HomeAdvisor.com
Your first step is to register with HomeAdvisor.com.
This actually helps you in two ways. First, it allows you to get leads on projects in your area. You have the option to indicate which projects are a good fit for your situation and this can drive additional business your way. This is a good move even if you haven’t gotten a bad review.
Second, registering gives you a chance to respond to online criticism at HomeAdvisor.
Respond to ratings and criticism
The second, crucial advantage of registering is that it gives you the chance to respond to criticism and bad ratings. While HomeAdvisor doesn’t offer formal mediation like the Better Business Bureau (BBB) does, it does give you crucial space to reply to a complaint.
This can be a chance to tell the story from your perspective. You can see the customer complaint and address specific parts of it. This is the chance to tell the rest of the story – like the parts your unhappy customer forgot to tell.
