Repeat Custom

The other day our financial adviser raised an interesting topic of conversation, and that is very few people building ever use the same builder twice.

I'm sure if you spoke to builders then they would tell you about loads of repeat customers, and I'm sure they do have them, but they probably have very no way of being aware of the repeat customers they have effectively lost vs the number of customers who never built again.

However from a financial advisers POV this is probably quite a valid observation, they tend to work with customers through a number of projects and can see the relationship people have with their builders from a distance.

I'm guessing that what this unofficial statistic suggests is that anybody building a house is doomed to be disappointed by their builder, and conversely builders are very practiced with dealing with disappointed customers.

So, what are we talking about here? Are the vast majority of builders really that crap, or do their customers have unrealistic expectations that the builder is doomed to disappoint.

The other thing this suggests is that builders are very practiced with dealing with disappointed customers, and and are very aware that despite a large number of disappointed customers behind them, they are still very much in business... so getting pissed off at your builder is probably not going to achieve much, if they are well practiced with upsetting customers then they wont care, and if not then its probably counterproductive anyway.... these words are liable to haunt me later!.

Another point is the validity of reviews on the internet, at face value the internet appears to be a great place to get reviews on contractors, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that most review sites are a waste of time.

Firstly most people just don't bother posing reviews, yet people who are severely pissed off are always going to negative reviews.

Secondly, whilst I appreciate there are many very satisfied customers that post glowing reviews, I'm also aware that there are many unscrupulous organisations who will post fake glowing reviews.

So, being aware of these factors makes it very hard to make good use of internet reviews, there is a lack of context, a company with 10 bad reviews may appear really bad, but if they had 1000 customers and 990 of them were satisfied yet never posted a review then the 10 bad reviews may not looks so bad after all.