“I have been registered on this site as a supplier of architectural services for a number of years, but have now decided to cancel my account. In all the time I have been registered very, very few of the buyer requests have appeared worth pursuing. Many are very obviously completely speculative, with little likelihood of a commission, or have totally unrealistic budgets. Of the five that I have paid for, only two were at all serious, and only one has resulted in a job. The others were a complete waste of my time. One of the 'buyers' wanted me to provide a quote, but wouldn't tell me what the job was, where it was, or what he wanted me to quote for. Utterly pointless. On that occasion Servicestart refunded the fee, but only after a lot of chasing. On a more recent occasion a similar thing has happened, but Servicestart have flatly refused to refund the fee of £70, even though the 'lead' was nonexistent. Buyers - please be aware that Sevicestart charge a very substantial fee to suppliers using the site. Please don't post requests unless you really do want serious quotes, and there is a realistic chance of a job arising. And suppliers, from my experience I suggest you don't waste your time or money using this site. Maybe for contractors doing small value jobs in some fields it may work out better. But for a consultant in a profession like mine, it's completely and utterly pointless, and you have little chance of being refunded for poor quality leads - which most are.”
“I have been using servicestart for a while now and initially the leads were good, but now more leads i purchase and contact, more the leads are poor quality.
the introduction emails are not answered and telephone no advertised, cannot get thru to them.
refunds are slow if repaid at all. customer support says they can't guarantee if the leads will respond. what are we paying for then?”
“I personally wouldn't bother with this company. The concept is quite good, you set your price for how much you want to pay for a lead, set you criteria and then they send you leads matching what you have specified.
Good concept but don't bother with this approach, make sure you make the choices because otherwise you get sent absolute crap and time wasters and you have to pay for this privilege.
When I first joined I wasn't quite familiar with the concept so emailed to clarify (mainly because I got a lead that was inappropriate and I didn't want to automatically pay for something I didn't want). They did improve slightly but it took weeks to reply to an email and the phone number on their site always went to 'mail box full.' Interestingly the phone number on this site works the best.
Anyway, when I finally got through to someone I asked for a refund on the leads, some were given but others surprise surprise, I had left too long- mainly because I was waiting for a response.
The leads I did get in contact with were poor quality and mainly people just looking for ideas and generally time wasters. It might work well with some professions but not mine.
Best bit about this company? Even though I had nothing but an average to bad experience with them they won't give you your money back. You just get credit that will now sit there.
Thankfully there are better sites in competition to this one that vet the leads properly, answer questions promptly and do give you your money back if you are unhappy. I personally would shop around a bit more and test some other sites.”
“When i first started using servicestart it worked well, but over time i found that more and more requests which i accepted, didn't lead anywhere. Customers either never answered phones or never replied to emails.
This began to happen more and more and it got to a stage where we were wasting money on leads which didn't even get off the starting block. It also became apparent that the customers were not made aware of the fact that as a trader i was getting charged to obtain their contact details. All customers that i spoke to said they didn't know anything about charges and as such i feel some people simple registered a job with no guarantee that they actually want to go ahead with it, not realising that they were costing businesses money. This is a major problem and one which i raised with servicestart bosses numerous times, only to be fobbed off.
Furthermore the fee's were getting more and more expensive (paying over £20 for contact details on a job maybe worth £300 is just not cost effective). In the end i went elsewhere and now use a much better site, which has much lower fee's and 95% of the leads end up successful.
Therefore on this basis I cannot recommend servicestart. It started out good and lead to some good leads, but it then declined and the customer service dissipated and was lacking, so i unfortunately had no other choice but to leave.”
Hi Paul,
Since you left a few years back we have introduced a new system through which you can set your own prices to pay for the leads you want. We figured that our clients know best the value of a new lead. So you can use either strict filter to take off all the leads you know you never want to respond to or adjust the price you are willing to pay for those that you are interested in but feel you cannot get the desired return on due to the cost to win a new job is too high for you.
Please feel free to contact us and we will introduce you to the new and improved tools. We really think this would make you change your mind. Also, as you probably know, unlike many other marketing channels you have no obligatory fixed costs or monthly minimums at all at on Servicestart. Hence we hope you would like to try the new service where you can set your own price.
