When the boss becomes the client

The stalwarts of Silicon Valley all sit down to big plates of dogfood, company-wide, in an effort to work out bugs in their software. “Eating your own dogfood” means using the software you make, often in beta form, to work out the kinks.

So, in this vein, ServiceSeeking CEO Jeremy Levitt last week used his own website to find a removalist and end-of-lease cleaner when he moved house. If the CEO doesn’t eat his own dog food, then why would he expect others to?

With thousands of removalist companies and cleaners on the site and many thousands of jobs posted in those two categories alone in just the first eight weeks of 2018, he was destined to find someone to help make his new transition smoothly.

“It’s always a good exercise to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and see your business from their perspective,” says Levitt.

With more than 30 individual quotes to choose from across his two jobs, Levitt had a great sense of the average prices in his local area. Far from wanting to pay more than necessary, like many customers, he was more concerned with finding a reliable business with great reviews that would take the utmost care of his belongings.

“Communication was a big factor in my decision – the removalist I chose was quick to quote and quick to respond to questions I had too. Their hourly rate was higher than most, but all-inclusive and fair. They had 290 reviews and a 5-star rating. I was confident going with them and they didn’t disappoint, so in turn, I’m happy to post a positive review about my experience.”

His experience highlighted the importance of peer reviews as valuable feedback to help others make decisions in the future.

‘The advice I have for businesses is that reviews are vitally important. If your happy customers aren’t leaving reviews, encourage them to increase your score. It’s hard to win jobs without reviews as you’ll need to drop your price to compete with more established businesses that have already built trust.”

”The process is exactly as we had intended. Posting a job was easy, and quotes came within minutes. One disappointing aspect was the lack of response by some businesses who actually bothered to quote – I am not sure why businesses don’t follow up each and every message promptly.  I was expecting businesses to reply sooner than 48 hours, which wasn’t always the case. The two companies I chose – Speedy Move and Correct Green Cleaning Solutions – always replied within minutes.”