Building Trust With HomeStars
We want to connect homeowners with companies they can trust.
Any information we receive that indicates a company might not be trustworthy needs to be passed on quickly to our readers.
Building trust with your HomeStars profile is pretty simple. Here are a few things to do and some things to avoid to make sure your profile gets a HomeStars recommendation and has the highest score possible.
- Regular reviews will keep your profile looking fresh and improve your score.
- Ask all of your clients to review the work you’ve done. Even better if they’ve used HomeStars before—homeowners who have written several reviews are trusted more.
- Don’t ask friends or family to write reviews or hire anyone to post reviews for you.
- This will negatively impact your score.
- Don’t worry too much if you get a negative review.
- Respond to the review. Addressing concerns directly shows your company is committed to providing great service and open to feedback.
- Investigate reviews only when you do not recognize the author or job being described.
- Investigation request for anything else, like disputing the details in a review, will not be processed and can negatively impact your score.
- Asking a homeowner to remove a negative review will lower your recommendation level.
- If a resolution occurs, they can edit their review to change their opinion.
- Respond to messages.
- If a homeowner writes a review or sends you a message, respond in a timely manner. Even if you can’t help them, just let them know.
- Fill out your profile completely and keep it up to date.
- Use the HomeStars for Business App to publish photos of your current work and then ask for a review from your smartphone.
- Regularly check to make sure insurance, licenses, accreditations and business registrations are all up to date. Ensure your company’s credit rating is in good standing.
What is Star Score?
Star Score measures the trustworthiness of the hundreds of thousands of contractors on our site. This new Score is calculated out of 100% much like exam scores, and takes into account many variables that we know through experience to be critical when choosing a trustworthy home professional.
The Score each contractor is given is defined by a number of important aspects of a contractors’ performance and changes dynamically, as the contractors’ business evolves. Here’s how it all works:
- Average rating is no longer a straight average of all reviews ever posted to a contractor profile. Reviews are now weighted based on a number of critical factors such as age of the review and reviewer attributes
- Recency measures how long it’s been since the company last had a review published
- Reputation measures whether a company has ever tampered with reviews or bullied homeowners to remove reviews. It is also impacted when we do not have enough information, like in the case of a low number of reviews
- Responsiveness measures how well a company responds to Service Requests and Reviews