Review guidelines

We’ve written this guide to help you understand who should leave a review, why reviews are important and some helpful tips as to what a review can cover.

There are two types of reviews you can leave

· Pre-work reviews: you’ve been in touch and experienced their customer service

· Post-work reviews: you’ve had work undertaken or paid money

Reviews are important, here’s why

· Reviews help other homeowners make an informed choice who to hire.

· To be eligible to make a claim under our Guarantee you must leave a review. Other eligibility criteria applies.

· Positive reviews help the trade build a reputation, so talking about your great experience matters and helps homeowners make an informed decision when selecting a trade

· A collection of reviews helps paint the fuller picture. Whereas word of mouth from the neighbour is one opinion.

· We monitor the reviews to make sure trades meet our Checkatrade Standard.

· Reviews are useful feedback allowing tradespeople to monitor the service they provide.

· Reviews also help us understand where things have gone wrong. We are here to support when things go wrong and work in partnership with homeowners and trade towards an amicable resolution.

Reviews on our site are verified

· All reviews left on Checkatrade are subject to our industry leading checks. We have a dedicated team to authenticate reviews are genuine and investigate any suspicious activity. Up to 90% of reviews on site are successfully verified each month, so don’t be surprised if you receive a SMS or call asking you to verify your review.

· You will be asked to leave your name, mobile number, or email so we can verify your review. These details are not displayed.

You may be asked to provide evidence to support your review so that we can undertake an investigation and potential action where required. The more factual your review, the more useful.

· We take fake reviews seriously – should we have evidence someone is posting fake reviews we will remove the review and where applicable, the trade from our platform.

What you should cover in a review

· You can post a positive or negative review – due to our Checkatrade Standard we remove trades with consistently poor reviews.

· Be factual and concise – think about key points as there is a word count! Think about the information you want others to know about that trade.

· Don’t post something to deliberately upset and damage a business – this is not fair and also is likely to be defamatory and therefore removed.

· Avoid jargon it’s important everyone can understand the content of reviews.

· Avoid using terms like “cowboy”, “con artist”, “scammer” these might be your opinion but the facts are much more useful to others and easier to evidence. Language like this is likely to lead to removal of the review.

· Don’t use names, numbers or addresses or anything that identifies a person – it infringes on a person’s personal data and human rights, so we can’t post the review

· Avoid profanities as this will lead to removal of the review

You can take down a review

· If you decide you no longer want your review to be published you should contact [email protected].