How We Got Here
I always thought I knew who the best plumber was in my city. They had an amazing plumbing store with every conceivable plumbing part you could ever need along with super knowledgeable staff. They had even won a local award for over a decade recognizing them as the best plumber in the city, but when I finally needed a plumber I thought I would quickly compare them to some other plumbers I had seen around town.
My little bit of research quickly turned into a much longer, eye-opening journey as I discovered that my favorite plumbing shop actually provided horrible service in peoples’ homes. Reviews on social media sites were scathing, they had a good number of complaints on the Better Business Bureau’s website, and their sister company in a near-by city wasn’t any better. How could they win awards and be in business so long if they were as bad as people were saying they were in reviews. Maybe these review sites were just full of complainers. I wanted to figure this out. So I scoured the internet to find every online review, rating, comment and bit of information I could on every plumbing company in my city (one of the larger ones in Canada) and surrounding cities. Only after compiling this information did I feel that I could fairly compare all these companies.
The results were surprising. Many companies who looked great on the surface were actually among the worst service providers in their industry. Some of these companies looked good because they had a good rating with the Better Business Bureau or because one or two rating websites gave them a host of favorable reviews. But in the end, none of these great looking factors on their own were necessarily an indication of a great plumbing company that consistently generates satisfied clients. All these factors had to be taken together and balanced. Only then could a fair comparison be made and the true service experts could emerge.
I also interviewed a lot of plumbers and learned more about what some of our research was revealing: some plumbing companies pay rating companies to get only their happiest customers to leave reviews for them online. Some companies even offer incentives to encourage their happiest clients to write reviews. This practice became painfully obvious as we began to compare same sized companies across Canada. One company with 30 employees could have 20 reviews over a period of three years while another company with the same number of employees would have 200 reviews over the same period of time. In one extreme case we even saw one plumbing company with almost 500 reviews on one major review website where every reviewer rated them a 10 out of 10. Then if this wasn’t suspicious enough, the company had no reviews – not one – on any other major review website, and the Better Business Bureau had never heard of them.
Why BestPlumbers.ca Exists
With this research complete it only made sense to make it available to others – because who else wants to spend 20 hours to researching plumbers? Discussing this project with a few friends, we decided it only made sense to do this research for other people in other cities across Canada . . . and so BestPlumbers.ca was born.
We hope our reviews and ratings are helpful to you. If you have any suggestions to make the site better, feel free to share them with us. We’d be happy to hear what you think.
The BestPlumbers.ca Team
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