I recently had to get my garage door repaired as I found I could not open and close it. I had expensive stuff in the garage and naturally felt very worried. In my panic, I contacted an on-line garage door repair company, but after they had fixed the door I realised that the hundreds of pounds I paid them was many times more than what I should have (the simple repair subsequently took just a few minutes, using cheap-to-purchase parts). The seemingly professional-looking company I used, complete with its brightly-coloured website displaying an apparently good review rating and giving multiple sincere assurances, appears to be purposely set-up to massively overcharge you before then making it extremely difficult/impossible to raise concerns with them in person (lots of automated voice messages, etc).
On reflection, I can see that I may well have been naive (some might say stupid) to trust this company and act as I did, but I would be interested to hear from anyone who might have had a similar experience and who can give me any pointers on how best to - legally - circumvent the 'difficult to contact' technological wall an IT-based company such as this seems to use once they've shamelessly fleeced you.
Following my bad experience, I took the trouble of looking at the garage door repair industry in general (different-sized companies, typical customer complaints, etc.) and - at the risk of stating the obvious - concluded that anyone needing to use a repair company should:-
- First and foremost, fore-arm themselves by finding out the average prices for different repairs/parts (a quick search on-line easily yields this info.).
- Talk to other garage-owning friends/neighbours if possible (word-of-mouth recommendation can tick a lot of boxes).
- Get as many quotes as possible (a bit of a pain maybe but, as with 1., individual customers have literally saved themselves £000's doing this).
- Be wary of companies offering rapid call-out (this will no doubt seem uber-convenient, but can often equate to rapid rip-off!).
- Be wary of free/no-obligation quotes (larger companies in particular will try and redeem the cost of offering this by then giving a massively-bloated price).
- Avoid getting pressurised into accepting a quote and, if the quoter gets aggressive, follow your intuition and walk away.
- Understand that fixed-prices and/or pensioner discounts are pretty meaningless if the price is already ludicrously high.
- Be very wary if a company is quick to significantly reduce the price via haggling (such haggling = dodgy, and any lower price is still likely to be hugely inflated).
- Resist automatically trusting a company's overall customer review score (research has shown it may well not be all it seems), prioritise reading the bad reviews over the good.
- Use a genuinely local company with local premises (easier to go to if problems arise).
- Avoid any company asking for payment, ANY payment, before the repair is actually done (a truly upfront and honest company will not do this).
- Only pay when you have been given a written, dated receipt that includes a price breakdown for parts & labour and details of any guarantee being offered.
- Note that all repairers tend to offer free guarantees, but some - including larger companies - consistently fail to honour them (refer to the bad reviews).
- Try not to panic (larger companies in particular, like some locksmiths, ruthlessly exploit homeowners' security anxiety/lack of technical know-how) and if worried about keeping contents safe, phone a repairer who - if a good one - should give free advice over the phone on how best to secure the garage in the interim.
In my findings, and perhaps the most extreme example of less-than-honest behaviour, I noted many instances where so-called experienced engineers/technicians (as typically described by the repair company) had tried to sell brand-new and overpriced doors to customers - including pensioners - when there were infinitely cheaper solutions, such as new fuses, replacement batteries for the remote control or a quick and simple servicing of the door! Similarly on the trying-to-be-proactive theme and with the aim of preventing others exercising the same sort of knee-jerk reaction I was guilty of, I am offering my garage-owning neighbours (some of whom are elderly) A4-sized, brightly-coloured/difficult-to-miss labels to simply attach to the insides of their garage doors, summarising the 14 points I have listed above and - as an additional warning - giving the specific name of the repair company I had the misfortune of using.