Lessons From BBB Complaints
When the Council of Better Business Bureaus in Virginia tallied up all the complaints and inquiries received by its bureaus last year, it found that consumers had more problems purchasing services than products--lots more. According to the council’s annual survey published this summer, service transactions accounted for three of the five top categories of complaints, four of the five complaint categories with the lowest settlement rates, and three of the five most common subjects of “pre-purchase inquiry.”
All but two (auto dealers and mail order companies) of the top 10 business groups cited in complaints were service firms. Consumers most often turned to their BBB for help with home improvement and remodeling companies. Not far behind were general services (carpet and dry cleaners, funeral directors, utility companies), followed by travel and real estate, and personal and professional services (beauty and barber shops, child care centers, dance and driving schools).
Fortunately, most of them also appeared among the top 10 subjects of pre-purchase inquiries. Had consumers not made all those inquiries, there might have been even more post-purchase complaints.
What the council’s survey doesn’t give is the story behind the statistics, a hint of the particular trouble consumers experienced. What’s more, we are left to wonder why these relationships--and they are relationships, more than the encounter with a product salesman--are so fragile.
For starters, what you see ain’t necessarily what you get. With a product, “you can see it, plug it in, try it,” says Barbara Opotowsky, president of the Better Business Bureau of Metropolitan New York. “You look at a sofa, you get a sense of its quality. With a contractor, maybe he speaks well, but you’re buying a promise, which leaves more room for misunderstanding.”
It may also leave room for misrepresentation and outright swindles. The bureaus hear plenty about workmen who take advances and never show up and, more recently, of “advance fee” loan services, which take money up front to arrange a consumer loan, and then never come through.
They also hear about workers who turn out to be unprepared to do the work. Some service businesses are relatively easy to enter and, particularly in today’s economy, people may jump into such a business untrained and inexperienced. Their investment is small, says Bob Hampton, president of the BBB of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. “They have no inventory. It’s just some equipment and the sweat of your brow.”
The economy makes the consumer a softer touch as well. Feeling pinched, they go for the cheapest, too-good-to-be-true offer. Out of desperation, they’re drawn to the easy loan and credit offers that end up as complaints at the Better Business Bureau. “Things are bad, people need money and credit, and they fall for pie-in-the sky offers in the hope of improving their situation,” says Lona Luckett, director of operations at the Cypress bureau.
Pressed or not, consumers seem amazingly unquestioning. “People will spend $10,000 to remodel but won’t drive down the street or pick up a phone to look into what a contractor has done,” observes Hampton. “They could do so much more to protect themselves, but we’ve made them think they’re better protected than they are. They think some newspaper or attorney general or a Better Business Bureau will get them out of the mess.”
In fact, as the BBB survey suggests, even more is asked of consumers when they buy services than when they pick out a product, and they handle it less well. Essentially promissory and intangible, the arrangement requires conversation and negotiation, even challenge, and few of us are adept in those areas, having been trained since childhood to be polite, tactful and nonaggressive.
All those “pre-purchase inquiries” are probably a good beginning, although they may elicit only limited help. Some bureaus tell consumers the number of complaints they’ve received about a particular firm, some the nature of the complaints. Some reveal the nature of the complaints only if there was a pattern to them; some give no descriptive details but note whether a company failed to resolve negative complaints.
Almost all suggest other places where the consumer can make inquiries--government regulators if it’s a regulated industry, licensing agencies if licenses are required, consumer protection agencies and officials. And all stress the need to demand references, and to follow up on them.
Basically, the Better Business Bureaus--and their complaint counts--reiterate what we learned as kids. When in doubt, speak up: How are you going to learn if you don’t ask questions?
Services Are a Tough Buy
A good remodeler can be hard to find.
Below are the businesses that received the most complaints in 1990, according to the Council of Better Business Bureaus.
Rank Industry 1 Home improvement companies 2 Service firms (except auto) 3 Ordered product sales 4 Vehicle dealers 5 Auto repairs and services 6 Financial services 7 Travel/vacation-related services 8 Personal and professional services 9 Credit/credit services 10 Health and medical services
