Checkatrade from Chichester 01243608801 / +441243608801
Caller Name: Checkatrade more...
Ratings: 7
Assessment: neutral, slightly negative, check call critically
NIKKI wrote: Daily calls off this number hounding me to sign up. I've emailed and also answered to tell them to s... all ratings
Details about this number
City: Chichester - United KingdomTelephone number: 01243-608801
International:
Further Information: Find out
tellows score for +441243608801
Distribution of call types and caller names in reviews
Types of call:
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Aggressive advertising 3 reports |
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Trustworthy number 2 reports |
Caller Name:
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Checkatrade 4 reports |
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CheckaTrade 1 reports |
Approximate caller location
Who calls with 01243608801?
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Checkatrade Busted reported Checkatrade with the number 01243608801 as Aggressive advertising
Kevin Byrne MD Checkatrade Busted by Daily Mail.
The online rating for the curtain company certainly looked very promising. As my partner, Stephanie, enthused: ‘It must be good — it’s got an average score of ten out of ten.’
Gushing reviews on tradesman-rating website Checkatrade also left us in no doubt that Curtain Fit came highly recommended. According to previous customers, company chief Max Mason was ‘fantastic.
Excellent manners and service’ and ‘a very pleasant family man with 20 years’ experience’.
After several eye-watering quotes from local firms to supply new bedroom curtains for our home in Surrey, it was a relief to find someone who appeared to be so highly rated. Stephanie phoned Max, and he was indeed personable and professional.
Nick Harding wasn't impressed by Checkatrade or the highly-rated supplier he selected there
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Nick Harding wasn't impressed by Checkatrade or the highly-rated supplier he selected there
After agreeing a price and a four-to-five-week turnaround, Stephanie was dispatched to buy material.
That was at the end of March. Today, despite paying £860 — £560 for the service and £300 for material — we still don’t have our curtains. What we have had, however, is a distressing 11-week insight into the world of a Checkatrade top-rated company, one that culminated in abuse, phone calls to the police, dodgy business practices and customer service that would make Basil Fawlty look like Employee of the Month.
Of course, problems with tradesmen are not unusual. That’s why Stephanie and I try to get recommendations. But it’s not always easy: friends won’t necessarily have had similar work done or they may not have been impressed with workmen they’ve employed.
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Websites have sprung up to help home-owners find tradesmen with confidence. Checkatrade, which sponsors the weather report on Good Morning Britain, is one of the top ones, with 7.5 million website visits in a year and almost 15,000 tradesmen listed. It claims to have been set up to protect the public from cowboy builders.
Log on to its website and you are greeted with the headline ‘Find a tradesperson you can trust’, with blurb boasting of ‘background checks, feedback and phone numbers’. Pictures of reliable-looking tradesmen appear alongside glowing testimonials from satisfied customers.
Checkatrade says it provides background checks, feedback and phone numbers to its almost 15,000 members
Checkatrade says it provides background checks, feedback and phone numbers to its almost 15,000 members
As my experience shows, however, perhaps the website isn’t quite as trustworthy as it would have customers believe.
Checkatrade was founded in 1998 by businessman Kevin Byrne, who was horrified to find that, after a tornado ripped through his home town of Selsey, West Sussex, rogue traders travelled from all over the country to take advantage.
Insurance puf
He said his aim was to create a free information service to allow customers to choose tradesmen based on reputation, rather than fancy adverts. The idea was successful: the firm is thriving, with an £8 million turnover and 145 employees.
I’d assumed Checkatrade worked in a similar way to eBay — firms relied on good ratings from past customers to get new business. If someone had a bad experience, it would be reflected on their profile on the website.
Instead, the complaints procedure is long and laborious — which is perhaps unsurprising when one discovers that the company is funded by tradespeople who pay hundreds of pounds to appear on the site, not by customers using the site to find workmen.
In our case, problems soon arose. Max said our curtains would be ready for May 7, but when the deadline passed with no sign of them, we started to chase him.
His excuses ranged from holidays to him being in hospital to problems with sub-contractors.
On Checkatrade if you don't complete an online form the tradesman automatically gets marked 10 out of 10
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On Checkatrade if you don't complete an online form the tradesman automatically gets marked 10 out of 10
Reassured by the testimony on Checkatrade, Stephanie and I tried to remain understanding, knowing that even the best firms encounter problems. We voiced our dissatisfaction by email on May 15, and Max offered a goodwill rebate of £50. It never arrived.
On May 24, after hearing nothing, we emailed Max again and eventually threatened to call the police.
In a final bid to track Max down, I logged on to Checkatrade — Curtain Fit’s profile was still there in all its ten-out-of-ten glory — and requested a ‘callback’, which is how customers initially contact firms. I received an automatic reply from the website saying: ‘We have passed your details on to the tradespeople you selected. They will contact you as soon as they can.’
Max replied by text, saying he had been in hospital and that the curtains were ready for collection.
The following weekend, Stephanie made the 30-minute journey through traffic to the rooms Max rented at a hardware shop in Twickenham.
She found lots of material and other people’s window dressings, but no sign of our curtains — or, indeed, Max.
She called and texted, but he seemed to have disappeared. The shop owner said he hadn’t heard from him either, and was concerned that goods were piling up. We called the police.
Previously, Max had given me his home address — again in the Twickenham area. We went there and discovered he’d moved and left no forwarding address.
I spent hours scouring social media and the internet for clues. After identifying Max’s partner on the electoral roll, I attempted to contact her through Facebook, to no avail. I discovered he’d been a DJ at one point and emailed his old DJ booking agent, again in vain.
By May 31 the Curtain Fit profile had been taken down. I later learned from Checkatrade that other customers had also complained.
By now, extremely angry that I appeared to have been ripped off, I emailed Checkatrade to inform them and argued that, rather than remove the profile altogether, it would make more sense to keep it ‘live’ but with a warning for others who might have found Max’s details through other sites.
I filled in an automated ‘customer comment’ form — sparing no detail of my experience.
Two days later, I received an email informing me that ‘Checkatrade take negative comments very seriously’ and asking me to rate Curtain Fit on a scale of zero to ten in terms of criteria including tidiness, reliability and quality of workmanship.
I declined to fill in the form, judging that it was intended for those whose jobs had been completed, but emailed explaining the situation and my dismay.
On June 6, I had a call from Checkatrade’s complaints team, who told me Max had turned up and was intent on sorting things out. This coincided with the re-appearance of Curtain Fit’s glowing profile on the site with no mention of my — or anyone else’s — dissatisfaction.
When I queried this, Checkatrade said they were confident the story Max had given them — that he had been unable to work because he was devastated after his partner left him — was true. Curtain Fit had been on the site for six months with no complaints, they said.
When Max contacted me about a day later to inform me of his personal situation, he offered a full refund and compensation.
However, two days later, after I’d requested compensation for the journey Stephanie made to buy the material, he reneged on the offer and called me a ‘silly little man’.
To add insult to injury, a few days later I received a copy of the complaint that was being put to Max on my behalf from Checkatrade.
I was aghast to discover I’d been quoted as rating his workmanship as ten out of ten, even though he hadn’t done anything except cause stress and anxiety.
The reason for this, I was told later by Checkatrade, was that all scores on the online form were set at a default of ten if, like me, you didn’t fill it in.
I started to look at other companies — from plumbers in Liverpool and electricians in Birmingham to bricklayers in London — on the site. What I found disturbed me.
The majority of people on Checkatrade, it seemed, scored between nine and ten out of ten. It was extremely hard to find anyone who rated less than an 8.5.
I have no doubt there are many fine tradesmen on the site; I have spoken to people who’ve had good experiences with Checkatrade.
However, I began to wonder where the less-than-glowing reviews were; even just the average ones. It was then I looked further into how Checkatrade operates. Workmen pay more than £800 to feature on the website.
‘Members’, as they call them, are interviewed before they are accepted, they are required to hold current public liability insurance and the correct qualifications for their trade. Checkatrade also checks ID and takes five references from previous customers.
Once on Checkatrade, a workman is issued with feedback forms to hand out to customers. The forms ask customers to rate the worker on different criteria on a scale of one to ten. The scores are collated and an average given. In theory, customer comments are published straight after each job.
But I discovered that only applies to the positive ones, as Checka-trade makes it very difficult to post negative comments. In fact, the complaints procedure appears weighted in favour of the trades.
The site tells members: ‘We would never publish a negative comment or scores lower than five, without contacting you first. Should we receive complaints of a serious nature, the consumer will be asked to complete a form, and this activates our complaints procedure, which is overseen by one of our experienced customer services staff.’
It appears that tradesmen’s profiles are either taken down while complaints are investigated — as in my case — or stay up, with all the glowing recommendations intact.
The member is given 21 days to address the complaint and put the job right, after which the customer submits a new feedback card.
The site tells traders: ‘If you feel the complaint is unjustified, send us your side of the story. Your reply will be published on our website next to the customer’s comments. If you do nothing, the comment will be published as it is after 21 days.’
Ironically, while it was hard to find any negative reviews on Checka-trade, it’s easy to find criticism of the site itself on other internet forums.
‘If they accept good reviews, they must allow the negative ones. Customers are not getting the true picture,’ said one post.
A nother wrote: ‘We left a negative two-star review on Checkatrade and it never showed up on the tradesman’s page. It seems Checkatrade only shows glowing reviews, which defeats the object.’
I spoke to Lisa, from Bournemouth, who’d employed a roofer on Checkatrade to fix a slight leak in a flat roof. She told me: ‘The job was postponed. Another guy arrived and patched up the roof, but when it rained the leak was worse than before.
‘I called and emailed and there was no reply so I went on Checkatrade and wrote an honest review of the situation. He got a letter detailing my complaint and as soon as he got it, he called and offered to come round and sort out the problem.
‘He had three weeks to rectify the problem but didn’t, so the review eventually went up — right down near the bottom of the list, because in the 21 days it took to go live he’d done other jobs and the feedback from these was placed higher. Anyone who didn’t look past the first page wouldn’t have seen my comments.’
Checkatrade’s complaints team were courteous and professional, but gave Max the benefit of the doubt until finally taking his profile down again after, as they told me, more complaints from customers.
Finally, two weeks ago, Max eventually provided me with a partial refund and then, after more to-ing and fro-ing, including me reporting him to the police, he paid the balance.
I gave him two rights of reply for this article. The first time was when he told me about his personal situation. He never replied to my second offer. Meanwhile, Checkatrade maintains its complaints procedure is robust, balanced and fair.
Gavin Dutton, head of operations, said: ‘We are always willing to take on board comments. We could have put the negative comments about Curtain Fit on the site but I think switching the profile off was better than having comments go on it with low scores. In no way would we want to advertise this gentleman and his business.
‘The 21-day window for complaints to be published is there to try to get a resolution. We have a duty of care to make sure what we publish is fair to both parties. We are similar to Trading Standards in that process.’
The company says it will look at its practices in light of my experience. But I won’t be using it again.
Thankfully, I no longer need to look at the company’s sponsored early-morning TV weather report.
Because when the sun streams through the windows at 5am and wakes me up because I have no curtains, I can see what kind of a day it’s going to be with my own bleary eyes.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2671559/Can-trust-website-claims-banish-cowboy-workmen.html#ixzz382uXyjRb
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NIKKI reported Checkatrade with the number 01243608801 as Aggressive advertising
Daily calls off this number hounding me to sign up. I've emailed and also answered to tell them to stop ringing but they don't. Now I'm getting voicemails and scam calls threatening with me arrest and seizing my assets. I have had this number for years and never had a scam call until I left my number with check a trade.