When someone searches for an inspector on the HomeGauge site it shows a list of inspectors and says (in my case) 76 Ratings. When you click “Ratings” it shows past clients’ words but not the actual ratings. I may be misremembering, but didn’t it use to show a number of STARS or cumulative ratings numbers or something?
I have customers, every week, who found me online because I spend a lot of time on my SEO stuff. And they ALL look at reviews. Reviews on a 3rd party site boosts your Google score and are far more credible than the ones (that our mothers wrote) that we post on our on site.
Some people feel the numbers don’t matter and that real customers don’t look at HomeGauge’s site for inspector referrals. But I know that’s not true. Please put the stars back and real scores. This IS a big deal if you rely on the Internet for business. I get random customers, weekly, that I have had ZERO direct contact with, who research me AND book their own inspection on my site. It’s a beautiful thing. The question shoudn’t be “who needs this?” It should be “who doesn’t”?
If not, stop saying “ratings” when it’s really just custome comments. I will change my TRM mesages to go to Google+ or someplace else. My customers take the time to write nice words AND give me a score, but if the only time I see the score is in the email notification I get from HomeGauge, what’s the point? And I can’t respond to the comments either (ALWAYS respond to every review!) I thought we used to be able to do that as well (but I could be misremembering).
HomeGauge allows us to remove any awful or unfair reviews so I don’t think this should hurt anyone. I suspect that maybe some inspectors were getting butthurt because of some crappy reviews or didn’t like being ranked lower than others and it was causing bruised feelings. But I don’t care. I work hard for every referral and ranking and am proud of every single star I’ve earned.
If you are NOT going to fix this AT LEAST change the misleading language of “RATINGS” site-wide and if you put any stars next to names put 5 gold ones instead of the crappy single gray star next to everyone’s name. Seriously, that looks like we’re all 1-star bozos.
It’s stuff like this (and moving the forums offsite) that make me question HomeGauge’s understanding of the value of driving traffic to their site and ours.
Norm Tyler
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