When Geek Squad first came to my town, I had a meeting with a few other PC repair techs that I was in association with at the time to discuss potential repercussions of its Bellingham, WA launch. The single constant we believed that customers were going to fail to grasp was the importance of a trusted relationship with the tech you are working with. So for Best Buy to contract with a company hiring techs carrying fake badges and driving “nerd-mobiles” was a difficult thing to compete against for some technicians.

Well today, it appears the value of maintaining a clear relationship with the person repairing your PC has just been proven even more important. Of course, this is not to say that a trusted private technician couldn’t potentially try the same thing. Now, to naively believe that background and personality checks will prevent this sort of thing is a fantasy.

So what is a PC repair client to do? Simple, stick to local, long-term, highly recommended services. Because if there was an offense to be had, it would more than likely have happened during the course of the provider’s years of repair service by now.

I believe this holds true with long term care services, babysitters, and other services that involve inviting strangers into your home. What we need to do as a virtual community is to work together on all fronts to help prevent this kind of thing from happening. First off, trust who you know. I am interested in services like ReferNow.com, which help to streamline the lines of trust between local businesses and the customers who use and trust them.

To be clear, I am sure that Geek Squad has some qualified, trustworthy technicians in its employ. At the same time, trusting a large corporation to refer a service tech to your home that you have never met is never a smart move as far as I am concerned. When it comes to in-home services, I myself will only trust those with a proven track record at the individual level, based on references and years of service.

Unrelated FYI: When responding to Just Ask Matt posts, please use the comments area as the subject of the article will not see email sent to me. The email listed is for questions, not the solutions. Thanks! :)

[tags]trust,local business,referral,repair,service[/tags]