Landscaper launches customer review site

If your customers want to hire a reliable, professional landscaper, they’ll most likely ask a friend for a recommendation or search sites like Yelp or Angie’s List to find someone with a good reputation.

A newly launched site, ContractorsCustomers.com, gives businesses the same option when looking at new customers. Users can review customers based on their experiences and look at potential customers’ ratings before agreeing to do service. General contractors are also able to rate subcontractors and vice versa.

Members give customers a star rating of one to five and choose yes, no or neutral for questions like:

Would you work with this person again?

Would you recommend this person to another business?

Were you paid in a timely fashion?

“From those answers you can get a good, solid amount of information and the next person can decide if that’s a customer they’d like to work with or they might pass on,” says Scott Carzo, president.

Members can see how each question was answered, but there are no open-ended questions or room for additional comments in order to keep things professional. “Some of the downfalls of existing sites that are similar is just that – the discussion gets off track and that’s what we’re trying to avoid,” says Carzo, who also owns Perennial Landscape Corporation of Massachusetts in Woburn, Massachusetts. “We want to keep it on track and professional, and we want to provide information to people that they can use to make better decisions.”

The site has been up for about a month and Carzo says he’s been pleased with the response so far. “It’s not very many but it’s proportionate to how long we’ve been there.”

The company is based in Boston, so that has been the main area of focus, but Carzo says the site has attracted members from all over the country from Massachusetts to California.

Signing up is free right now but the company will start charging fees at some point. “The fee to join and the time in which we start charging for it are to be determined,” Carzo says. “We are calculating those figures based up on the cost involved to attain new members and the rate at which we attain them.”

And Carzo says the site will be beneficial for both businesses and customers. “You hear people all the time complaining, ‘I can’t find good businesses to work with. I need better quality contractors,’ or what have you,” Carzo says. So he foresees customers asking business owners to give them a review after a positive experience in order to attract a better quality of company to work with.