Recently, a private message to our engineers was posted on social media. The message raised the issue of some negative reviews we’d received on Google and asked staff to encourage satisfied customers to leave good reviews. It also suggested that staff add reviews as well.
We have been called out on this but are happy to address it and offer some clarification here. The nature of working for insurance companies means that if a policy doesn’t cover a repair under its terms, it is our engineers or contact centre staff who have to deliver that bad news. This is obviously upsetting for people as they can be subject to an unexpected repair bill to get their boiler up and running (often when the weather’s at its worst and you can least be without heating and hot water). As the frontline face of that policy, negative reviews are therefore often directed at us: a common pitfall of insurance work. We understand the frustration that customers can experience when this happens but we also feel that this isn’t a true reflection of us as a company (completing around 3000 jobs per month for insurance companies, it was a very small percentage of our overall customer base). Unfortunately, human nature means that you're much more likely to leave a review when you're upset than when you're satisfied.
As a short term solution to this, we sent the message in order to create a balance that we felt better reflected the overall response that we get. This was a knee-jerk reaction and we soon realised that adding our own reviews was not a responsible thing to do and therefore not an appropriate course of action.
This was done for a short period of time and ultimately very few of the reviews on Google are from employees. Plus, the majority of those that did add them have actually used Plumbcare.com’s services due to the generous staff discount they receive so this is not as disingenuous as it may appear.
This was many months ago and we have since made it clear that we don’t want people to do this any longer. We do still encourage customers to leave us genuine reviews and we reward any engineers or contact centre staff who are praised by name as we feel good service deserves to be recognised.
We hope that this clears up the issue and apologise if, on this occasion, we have not upheld the high standards that we set for ourselves as a company.
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