Jacksonville North Carolina and "HVAC near me" Search

Finding a good contractor is tough, one that understands your needs as well as one you can trust to do the right thing and treat you like a person and not a paycheck. Often times it can be difficult to cipher through all the listings when searching for services, so hopefully this blog will shed some light on the good, the bad, and down right ugly.

When consumers are looking for HVAC services, often times we settle for the first company that says they can get there that day, and maybe that's the most important thing for you. For some, they may care about more than just that, so many customers will take to the reviews and see what they can find. Reviews can be misleading or they can be an indicator of what to expect. How will you know the difference?

First thing is context, if a review has a rating only without an explanation, I put no value on that even if the review is 5 star. No explanation tells me nothing about the service or experience. I also don't give credit to anyone that posts reviews about pricing but fails to provide details about the service provided. My idea of expensive and cheap are different even from my wife's perspective, so it's hypothetically impossible to believe that any 2 consumers will share the EXACT same perspective. I've talked about this before in several posts and I will even defend my competition when I say that we all have different suppliers, different overhead, and different operating costs and I have not found any one of my competitors personally that "over charged" a client for a service. I have found prices cheaper and more expensive than mine, but it boils down to the quality of the products, where the products are being purchased, cost of buildings/vehicles, office staff, software, benefit packages... Basically, I personally would not put value on reviews bashing a company for being over priced or even the good ones that say the company was very fair. If I had $200k sitting in the bank, I wouldn't care about $600 service call either. Just food for thought.

Another review I would put little value in are the ones that talk about scheduling issues when it comes to arriving late (not arriving at all "no call no show" is not what I'm talking about). When you run an in home service business and you have no idea what your techs are going to get into, it's very difficult sometimes to maintain a strict schedule especially towards the end of the day. Many service calls can take less than 2 hours, but sometimes they can extend to 4 hours, thus throwing a schedule off. In that case though I do expect a company to reach out and inform clients that have later appointments scheduled that there are some expected delays and be respectful of client's time. Like I stated before, this by no means dismisses the no call no shows. That's very disrespectful and absolutely warrants repercussions.

Enough with the what not to look at, how about indicators that will help guide you to the right contractor.

Reviews that share specifics about technician experience, ease of scheduling, repairs completed correctly and in a timely manner, and even price based review that mention the exact service provided. These are often organic reviews that will allude to the experience you can expect.

Let's start with technicians that get mentioned in review. If you see a trend in the review where a certain tech or techs are getting mentioned time and time again, that's usually a good indicator especially if you are set up for service from one of those techs. It's tough to get a positive review, it's even harder to get a positive review specifically mentioning a person. To do that, a technician has to provide an above and beyond experience. On the flip side of that coin, if you see negative reviews specifically mentioning a tech and their behavior, that's a really bad sign. I will leave this one at that.

Scheduling is really tough in our industry and even harder to maintain that schedule. Things out of companies control is technicians needing unexpected time off, vehicles accidents and failures, and jobs that are taking longer than originally expected. If you see a pattern of reviews mentioning that said company consistently shows up and responds when expected, they're already doing better than 85% of our industry. This is only possible when companies have truly mastered their processes from start to finish meaning it's easy for clients to get an appointment, communication is maintained all the way to the end resolution, and technicians are updated and informed properly.

The last indicator is going to be number of reviews, however; this is also the hardest to really judge a contractor. If a company has been in business for 1-3 years, you don't expect to see many reviews, but hopefully the few they have are amazing as they should be working the hardest to build an everlasting reputation and clientele. Companies with 10 plus years of operation you would expect to have many reviews and most likely the majority should be positive or they probably wouldn't be in business anymore. My personal rule, if i'm shopping for a service like considering going to a restaurant that I've never been to and I see less than a 4.5 star rating, i'm not going. While some people can never be pleased, the vast majority of people are very forgiving and understanding even if everything isn't perfect. That being said, it's fairly easy to maintain a positive image with the general public so long as you care even a little.

I know this blog is a little off topic from usual ones, but I hope this helps especially since we have such a transient community and in Jacksonville we have a ton of first time (young) homeowners.