Gas Safe Engineer

[rick]

I did look at comparison sites and review sites before going to them, it was an informed decision (on my part anyway)

[rick]

Happens a lot in industry graduate schemes ... show the schoolboy around departments for a few weeks then make him a manager.

[rick]

I do think this is the case.

There is a next 'step' After several calls with them, and then explaining if they are convinced they had never done any work on my account, then lets cancel the contract. They then agreed as a 'customer gesture' to proceed with the fault call out ....

I get an email with Engineer details ... he calls me about 30 min later .... and this is again amusing (Esther Rantzen material) ... he asks loads of technical Q's on boiler, then advises as its more than 8 year old I would be better installing a new one. I declined and said I would like breakdown call please. He then added, I haven't done work for them for a while they take too long to pay, so I'm turning this job down. !!

I called "Your Repair" ... prompt answer out of Hrs which was good .... explained the conversation, to then be told job should not have gone to him, we stopped using him 2 years ago. !! They will give the job to another engineer

30 min later I get an email - as an engineer they hadn't sent had carried out service they are rejecting call out - ticket closed.

I went back on-line raised a new ticket - explained this had been approved by Management .... and a new ticket get get approved, and engineer dispatched.

So this whole scenario including 'Phantom Service' could just be down to shoddy admin. Certainly seem to not talk to each other, or have good system for tracking.

[Andy Burns]

The female engineer will probably think the same

[Robin]

On 02/11/2020 13:22, rick wrote: <snip>

Have you tried putting where she said she lived into the Gas Safe search for domestic engineers and seeing who comes up?

[newshound]

Hey, it is 2021. Who needs facts?

:-)

Going slightly OT, isn't it mildly ironic that just when Boris seems to be beginning to do things right, and have a semi-coherent policy on Covid-19, the loony right is turning on him.

[John Rumm]

I was not questioning the choice of company (they may or may not be good

- I have no experience with them). I just found all the prattle suggesting the organisation was a scam or a "bedroom operation" was a bit tiresome since it was pretty evident that no one had actually bothered doing any research!

[John Rumm]

Did they not have any record at all of the first report you made on their web site?

[spuorgelgoog]

I expect they all work from home in their own back bedrooms.

Owain

[rick]

probably right there :-)

[rick]

The first report was me putting in a fault call last week - which was after the service - they have that, just no knowledge of service.

I did ask when do you expect to do service then - when they are quiet.

[michael adams]

In my original post I stated the following

" She doesn't work for Your Repair don't forget,.She's presumably self employed She'd "been requested" by them to do the service. Maybe she mostly works for other contractors and this was her first job for Your Repair. And she didn't follow the correct procedure which differs from the others after completeing the job."

Nothing I've read in this thread - the OP's experience in particular leads me to believe it couldn't still be being run from a bedroom. !6 employees or not. And neither do I automatically associate bedroom operations with scams, and nowhere in this thread have I suggested that it was. Which would, as you are doubtless aware, be defamatory were it shown to be false, and lay myself or anyone else making such claims, open to legal recourse.

michael adams

...

[michael adams]

The OP's initial experience with "YourRepair" speaks for itself.

No amount of research or additional "facts" is going to alter that.

The "loony right" are the ones who have never been in favour of masks or restrictions on personal freedom (to infect other people), from day one.

michael adams

...

[John Rumm]

IANAL, but I believe you are free to state an opinion that you hold and be free of risk of litigation. Its a different matter if you state something that proves to be defamatory as a "fact".

I note however that you did state "the big problem with *this as with almost all such surefire get rich quick schemes* is actually attracting customers." [my emphasis]. That seemed to strongly imply that you were claiming the company is a "get rich quick scheme" - a phrase not usually interpreted with a positive connotations, but perhaps I misread it.

[michael adams]

The business plan as I outlined it should they succeed in getting sufficient customers would indeed be a *get-rich-quick scheme". They don't need to cheat anyone. They're simply agents taking a percentage in linking prospective customers who are unaware of the Gas Safe Register, with Gas Safe Registerd engineers. What could be simpler ? Now what *would* be interesting would be knowing how they attracted those initial customers. Paying to have their Google ranking tweaked in some way perhaps ? The one point you *didn't* pick up I notice was my reference to their possibly using "fake reviews" initially. However fake reviews would be of little use to scammers. As the first thing you'd imagine anyone attracted by those reviews would do when scammed would be to themselves post a damning review. And presumably there's always CC chargebacks sufficient of which would soon lose them their CC merchant accreditation

Talking of reviews. All of *your" research comprised of finding out information which YouRepair provided about themselves. Which is fair enough. Whereas all of *my* research comprised of finding out what *other people* said about them.

And as it didn't make every good reading I declined to post it. On the grounds of not wanting to cause anyone unnecessary embarrassment. Nothing suggests dishonesty as such at all. Just people exploiting a business opportunity to the full, attracting customers unaccustomed to reading the small print The perfectly legal, "Virgin" model, in other words. And they're, YouRepair. maybe getting in over their heads.

So that page 1 of this review site, which is unfiltered and thus sorted by date

Suggests Your Repair gets glowing reviews. However reading further down the page brings up the second 1 star review from Monica Waldok

<quote>

I star For asking for a review on a 12 month support contract that is literally

10 minutes old ?? Doesn't bode well if this company is misleadingly racking up reviews based on customers' experience of merely spending their money and setting up an account? <quote>

So without going to the trouble of counting them all, many/most of their 5 star reviews appear to have been solicited by "YouRepair" within 10 minutes of customers signing up. The number of such customers posting reviews within a certain timeframe may indeed suggest they're going to need maybe more than one phone in that bedroom.

Filtering to display only 1 or 2 star reviews paints a pretty dismal picture I'm afraid.

Again all totally above board, and maybe par for the course. So its basically money for old rope, gone bad. With a lot of staff time apparently being devoted to responding to negative reviews in a hopefully convoking way. That dept being located in the front room, maybe.

michael adams

...

[bert]

In article <rnpou4$ams$ [e-mail], michael adams [e-mail]> writes

She had Series Land Rover for years.

[bert]

Take it up with Ofgem.

[michael adams]

The Queen never struck me as being particularly interested in luxuries of any kind. In fact she appears quite abstemious for a woman of her considerable wealth. But then at the time she was born her father was never expected to become King in any case, and so the expectations were lower during her early childhood.

The Queen Mum on the other hand, later made up for it all, what with all the off-licence bills and bookmakers accounts. Allegedly.

michael adams

...

[Dave Plowman (News]

Can't really see the queen mum nipping down the offy for her Gordons, somehow.

[John Rumm]

We obviously have a very different understandings of the phrase then, which I would take as being a scheme that promises a substantial income with little or no effort and risk.

Any enterprise that requires years to build, needs substatial capital investment, and requires the employment of many staff does not seem to fit that profile on either the effort or risk criteria.

You seem to be assuming that simply having access to the GS register in some way devalues the business proposition, which is nonsense. Having a list of local gas contractors is not the same as having a 24/7 facility get a problem fixed, and have someone do else all the leg work for you.

If you think a business opportunity is an easy road to riches, then go and actually build it first, then come back and tell us how simple it was.

Quite possibly - its called search engine optimisation and advertising. Something many businesses need to spend significant amounts of time and money on.

I agree that in general there are tones of fake and "paid for" reviews out there, but do you have specific reason to believe that is the case here?

So since they are still here 5 years later, and growing, does that reassure you they are not scammers then?

I looking at the audited accounts on the companies house web site and checked the nominet records for the domain name. I would not really class those as things "they" provided as such.

Remember I am not passing comment on their quality of service or customer satisfaction or even their basic competency, since I had never heard of the firm, used them, or for that matter have any reason to need the services of such a firm anyway.

I was not even singling out your post in particular either, it was just one of many that appeared to be inventing a whole narrative based on conjecture.

Research, that is addressing question of "is the quality of the service they provide any good", and not the point I was addressing about whether they were a fly by night operation running a scam.

Find me a review site for *any* business with with 1000s of reviews that does not have a proportion of 1 star reviews...

(and how do you know how many of are fake or malicious?)

Having operated service and consulting businesses for most of my working life I would argue that its very unlikely to be "money for old rope".

As to whether it has "gone bad" or not, I have no opinion, and don't care enough to spend the time forming one.

Perhaps.