Yet another “registered” appliance repairer scheme has popped up on the radar and it strikes me that this is doomed to fail before it even begins.
Look, I get it. Whether it's done on a commercial basis or, as we did with the WTA and UKW, virtually free, the idea of having repairers who are known to be decent and perhaps even to some degree qualified is a decent enough ask.
But…
The short of it is, the public don’t care.
Commercial clients care a bit, but not enough to pay for it.
Unless you’d somehow managed to attain a huge reach, were garnering a lot of public attention, and had compelling reasons to use registered members over not doing so, why should anyone bother?
In turn, why would anyone pay (anything) to be a member of such a thing?
This scheme seems to be an offshoot of The White Goods Training Academy, I can’t find it mentioned anywhere else so I’d have to be thinking, in the absence of any other source, that this was perhaps an attempt to add some legitimacy to newly trained repairers.
I can’t see any other reason for its existence.
After all, there are establishedf schemes out there already, or have been from DASA and the WTA. Why would another, unknown one, be required?
So, Here’s The Thing…
These days, there are fewer repairers than there have ever been, so far as I know, and so people are glad enough to get someone to repair a product if they need it—anyone!
There are swathes of the country that have nobody to repair certain products, be that by brand or type. Even in some major cities, getting coverage on some products can prove nigh on impossible.
When you set up a search facility for the like of this type of service it will often be used, sure but it tends to be used by people trying to find anyone that will repair a thing, not because they think they wil get a “better” repair.
And that’s actually another thing, how is a repair by one of these traders that happen to be registered better than a repair by anyone else?
For the public, it isn’t. It’s just a repair. They couldn’t give two hoots who do it. They only care that it’s done and at a price, they are satisfied with.
Chicken & Egg
Starting an endeavour like this, you need to get a lot of repairers onside and registered or at least in your database so that the search facility is remotely useful. Having a dozen or so (whatever number) repairers on there renders it largely useless.
But if you do that then most of the info on there is useless and you demonstrate how few repairers are signed up in relation to those that are not. Which shows how popular or otherwise your registered repair services are.
To get repairers signed up and, especially, to pay for this kind of service, you need to get a lot of traffic and enquiries, and you can’t get that without a huge cost in advertising or a lot of referrals to the service, which you can’t get without a lot of registered repairers.
Can you see the problem here and why I say that these kinds of services just won't work if they aren't set up and dealt with in the right way?
As far as I can see, there is no marketing for this new service.
Cynical View
The cynical view is this: If this is about ensuring that people (end users) get decent repairers, then why not leverage an existing and established service such as that provided by the WTA?
As that’s not been done and there’s a payment involved, if you were cynical, you could just say that this was a cash grab attempt, a way to generate some extra money as a side hustle, whatever. It makes no odds why, really.
It’d have been a lot simpler and less confusing for consumers to just use what is already there and already known.
Shooting At Stars
To set up something like that then try to get it established with probably the best part of a couple of thousand individual businesses, most owned by whom will have no clue who you are, what you do or why they would even want to use this will be an uphill stuggle at best.
Asking them to pay for it on top of that, I’d hazard you have no chance of success there.
The repairers are a fickle bunch and are even more cynical than I am so are very unlikely to welcome schemes like this with open arms.
How do I know this? We did it.