I was reading Ashish Sinha’s experience using various online classified/listing services (you can read it here) and have to confess I had a similar bad experience over the past 10 days. I will share the story and the learnings below. But, this whole experience has reiterated my firm belief that we need something like an Angieslist.com in India. As a consumer in the US, I used to heavily rely on this paid service to identify quality service providers (doctors, dentists, plumbers, baby sitters and the list goes on) with reviews from real customers. Here’s more info on Angieslist from Wikipedia.
Ok, here’s the story. My wife and I have been trying to find a good babysitter for our two daughters over the past year. We have gone through probably a dozen but still have not landed a good one. Most of the babysitters have come through referrals in our apartment complex and have not worked out for many reasons, which I don’t want to bore you with. But, about 10 days back, I decided to find a professional agency to help me with this and was willing to pay for their services as well as pay more for the babysitter if need be.
I asked around a few friends but none new of any good agencies. I was always a skeptic to find a service through the web without personal reviews but desperation drove me to it. I went to google and searched for relevant key terms and came up with listings from the usual suspects: Justdial, AskLaila, Quikr, Sulekha, Click.in, Locanto, etc. to name a few. I noticed that some of these sites had reviews for the services and read up reviews wherever available and picked the best one as per reviews in 3 different sites and browsing the company’s website. To summarize the experience with this agency we picked – it was horrible. The only thing they did right (for themselves) was cash a cheque we were stupid enough to give for their services and they were smart enough to collect upfront. You can skip next two paragraphs if you are not interested in the details
Baby s(h)itter experience
As tempted as I am, to mention the agency’s name, I will avoid and say that this agency was extremely professional and did show up at our house with a babysitter the same day I called them. We (my wife and I) interviewed both the agency and the babysitter and were extremely happy with the answers. We paid the agency the commission (steep one at that) and signed up for the service with the promise of three replacements of the babysitter in a year if not satisfied. Alas, that’s where the misery started.
Next day, the babysitter did not show up as promised. When we called the “agent” the agency provided she made some silly excuse and said that she would send a new babysitter the same day – the bait-and-switch trick! We were sent a new babysitter without any background info on her and after a cursory interview decided to try her – after all she was certified by the agency we thought. This person showed up late everyday for a week and finally didn’t show up one day. During this week, we kept calling the agency and “our assigned customer service agent was always traveling and would call us back” trick was pulled out of the bag. At this point we decided to stop the babysitter and tried contacting for a replacement and again “agent” will call back. Finally we pulled the plug and went back to an apartment referral babysitter.
What did I learn?
I went back and tried to figure out what are all the lessons from this experience. Here are a few:
- Always search for a service name followed by scam (or similar words) in Google before you sign up for it. For example: “XYZ services scam”. This was eye-opening since I found a handful of experiences very similar to ours. If I had read this before, I would have never called the agency.
- Of the various listings/classifieds site, only a few allow for reviews. I went back and tried leaving a review with as many of the ones as possible (to pay it forward). Even if it meant being forced to sign-up for an account with these sites.
- And, for the few like me who didn’t know this, the listing sites take down bad reviews on “listing owners” request as per a customer service agent at one of these listing sites I spoke to (to figure out why my review was removed). Obviously there is a revenue opportunity for them here and see why they are doing this.
- But, as a consumer, when you see a review on any of these sites you need to be aware that you are not paying for it and hence you cannot expect to get honest reviews from real customers on both good and bad experiences. You will find only “good” experiences that the “listing owners” like. Sad but true.
That brings me back to my point. I had alluded to this in a previous post “Whats On(line) in India?”. I would very much like an angieslist.in where the consumer pays but gets a trustworthy review. Anybody out there?
