Best Garages

cbyrne

all,

just a quick note to let you know that our old site www.recommendagarage.ie has been renamed to www.bestgarages.ie.

We have tried to take on board the many useful comments posted in our first month to try and improve on the initial offering and make this a useful site.

thanks for all the comments to date and look forward to your reviews..!

thanks

deegs

why did you change the name?

jawlie

deegs wrote: »

why did you change the name?

I did a search in Dublin for the best Audi garage, and there are none listed. What is the point of the site?

Spit62500

I posted two reviews on the site - one positive and one negative. The negative one is no longer there. Nothing I said was exaggerated or can't be backed up by paperwork etc. What, then, is the point of the site? Might as well just ask the SIMI for a recommendation

cbyrne

Deegs, changed the name because felt that recommendagarage was a bit long for a name, also bestgarages is a better representation of what we are trying to achieve. Personally liked the original name but that was the feedback we got.

Jawlie - the site works on the basis of positive reviews of garages by users. Therefore we don't just list all garages, someone has to recommend a good audi garage in dublin before they appear. We are only getting off the ground at the moment, so as people use the site more you should start seeing some garages which have been recommended.

Split62500 - The basis of the site has changed slightly, we are trying to focus on the best garages not the bad ones. (I need to check the reviews you submitted as we are still ironing out some ratings issues). I would like the site to be somewhat like the michellin star awards for garages, i.e. the michellin guide doesnt list bad restaurants. As many people have pointed out the proces of giving negative reviews of garages is fraught with legal issues and for the sake of keepinig the site as a useful guide this is something we want to avoid. We do still accept negtive reviews because its the overall average rating of a garage which decides if it appears on the site or not.

At the end of the day the site is still in its infancy and we are trying some different things and ideas to get it right, so thanks for the comments, hopefully this will evolve into a valuable asset for the motoring community

keefg

Much better name and the look of the site is a 100% improvement on the old design.

Best of luck with it.

cbyrne

Thanks Keef.

deegs

cbyrne wrote: »

Deegs, changed the name because felt that recommendagarage was a bit long for a name, also bestgarages is a better representation of what we are trying to achieve. Personally liked the original name but that was the feedback we got.

OK, main thing is to listen to your feedback and interpret it correctly.
Personally "best garage" sounds like a list you have purposely devised, whereas "reccomend a garage" "garage reccomendations" "garage reviews" etc sound more like what you are getting accross, Best garage to me sounds like expensive garage!. It just means that the people searching for your kind of site wont find it and the people searching for the something else will find you. Either situation is bad.

One side note... NEVER put your title words in plural. People are lazy, they will just type "bestgarage" not "bestgarages" (i know, i just did that )

Other than that its a good site, but put some work into the navigation, I found it hard to make my way back from a garage review. Well done, i will use this myself and have 3 garages to put in in Cork, 2 good 1 bad

-Chris-

cbyrne wrote: »

Split62500 - The basis of the site has changed slightly, we are trying to focus on the best garages not the bad ones. (I need to check the reviews you submitted as we are still ironing out some ratings issues). I would like the site to be somewhat like the michellin star awards for garages, i.e. the michellin guide doesnt list bad restaurants. As many people have pointed out the proces of giving negative reviews of garages is fraught with legal issues and for the sake of keepinig the site as a useful guide this is something we want to avoid. We do still accept negtive reviews because its the overall average rating of a garage which decides if it appears on the site or not.

My 2c would be that there should be positive and negative comments or ratings for garages, you can see the best, but you can also be warned away from the worst.

If you just go with the positive comments, you'll end up with something that's like the property sections - everything is wonderful for some reason or other, nothing is overpriced, cramped, badly located or ugly... :rolleyes:

I personally would get more use out of an eBay-style feedback system.

Spit62500

cbyrne wrote: »

As many people have pointed out the proces of giving negative reviews of garages is fraught with legal issues and for the sake of keepinig the site as a useful guide this is something we want to avoid.

I can understand what you're aiming for and I do think that its a good idea. With any such site users do have to keep in mind that what's posted is subjective and may sometimes be malicious. Even good reviews might reflect bias or low expectations. I usually check out hotels and the like on Tripadvisor before I book. I've read reviews from people that can obviously never be happy with anything as well as constructive reviews from other people. The good thing about Tripadvisor is that you get to see that bad reviews which are often the most important. People who are happy or reasonably happy with their experience may not feel moved to post a review but people who have had a bad experience might feel that its important to warn others.

One of the possible benefits of posting bad reviews is that garages may eventually feel obliged to improve their service. Its a long shot but worth a go.

timemachine

Totally agree with what Spit says. I do the same. I posted 1 good and 1 bad on the website, bad has since been removed, and my friend put a bad one to and has also been removed. With my friends review it was a serious complaint as he basically lost the car that he bought from the garage, spend over 4k on a car and over a 1k on repairs and having to go back to the garage every time, eventually sold the car for only 750 euro,and has all the paper work to support the issue, people need to know about these garaages.

Seth Brundle

Presumably the bad reviews were pulled because the garages will be quick to sue the site owners over a bad review and the site owners can't really follow it up. How ratemyteacher.ie and tripadvisor get away with it, I don't know!

keefg

kbannon wrote: »

How tripadvisor get away with it, I don't know!

Yeah, would love to know this myself, I have seen some real bad reviews on TA but they have come in very handy.

jawlie

It seems to be a pointless site if , when one looks it up, all one gets are reviews saying how wonderful every garage is. Where is the value to anyone of that information?

cbyrne

Thanks for the comments, its interesting to see different viewpoints and as I mentioned most of the existing changes were made based on previous comments on these boards so its a worthwhile excercie.

Other review sites such as ratemyteacher and tripadvisor are hosted from the US where the libel laws are a lot less restrictive, freedom of speech and all that.

On our site we are playing around with the display or not of reviews, and its something we are trying to get right and use in a way that will make this site a valuable resource. This is a bit hard to do effectively until we get a large amount of reviews, however all reveiws submitted are stored and its just trying to figure out what we display so nothing is ignored (and the negative reviews/ratings are always used in the garage overall review).

No one has tried to do what were doing (certainly not to my knowledge) or done it to date so bear with us while we get this right, its takes time and a bit of thinking but I'm confident we'll get there and as spit mentioned hopefully it will result in garages improving their service because of whats on the site.

egan007

Jeez lads, give him a break he's trying to improve customer service for YOU.
Good luck with the site

jawlie

egan007 wrote: »

Jeez lads, give him a break he's trying to improve customer service for YOU.
Good luck with the site

Are you saying that, as someone is trying to improve customer service for "YOU", we should not post our thoughts or comments? Or are you saying we should only post nice thoughts saying how wonderful it all is?

egan007

jawlie wrote: »

Are you saying that, as someone is trying to improve customer service for "YOU", we should not post our thoughts or comments? Or are you saying we should only post nice thoughts saying how wonderful it all is?

Do what you like ....maybe even leave the house once in a while.....get a girlfriend ...whatever...

Seth Brundle

Be nice egan!
Jawlie does have a point!

Auto Consulting

I think this is a great service, or at least it has potential to be once it gets up and running. Certainly a source I'll use in my line of business. It seems unfortunate that it has to be so restricted for libel or other legal reasons, perhaps if it was hosted from the US you could publish the bad reviews too?

Just one other observation, the site was designed by "eganfreelance" - is there a link there with egan007?

pburns

Auto Consulting wrote: »

Just one other observation, the site was designed by "eganfreelance" - is there a link there with egan007?

Mmmm...well spotted - Egan007 has also posted in the 'Digital Art and Design' and 'Programming' sections of Boards...:D...

cbyrne

thanks Autoconsulting, I know what your saying but really the focus of the site is on the good garages. As I said before my view of the site would be like a michellin/AA/Georgina Campbell food guide in that it should be a reference to those looking for good service/value. These guides dont' tell you where not to eat, if a restaurant isn't good enough it just doesn't get displayed. Now, I know there are differences and some issues with this process and that what I'm trying to solve, at the moment this seems the best way and I hope it works, if not then we'll have to look at other solutions

Other ratings site (we all know the ones) which are hosted in the US aren't in my view very useful and more often than not end up as just sites to b*tch about and moan - I don't want this site to be like that, we want to be positive. its important to note that all reviews good and bad are used though to calculate the overall rating, therefore if a garage has one good review and ten bad ones, then the ten bad ones will result in it not been shown.
I also know that as spit mentions, people are more likely to post when they have bad experiences, but I am hoping that this will change as the site becomes more popular and has more reviews and people find it useful. This is how tripadvisor works, there are as many positive reviews on this as negative and we as consumers need to get in a habit of praising good service as well as slating bad.

Jawlie, I appreciate all comments and these are important in deciding the direction the site takes, naturally it mightn't be everyones view on how it should work but I hope in time it is more useful for you, but I do takes everyones comments - thats why I posted here!

BTW, you have a chance of winning a Sat Nav system for all reviews posted in Feb and March

rgds,
Bestgarages.

jawlie

cbyrne wrote: »

As I said before my view of the site would be like a michellin/AA/Georgina Campbell food guide in that it should be a reference to those looking for good service/value.

I'm not sure the analogy, between food and getting a car serviced, works. Firstly, because when we pick up our car after a service, the majority of us have no idea if it has been well serviced, or badly serviced, or if it has actually even been serviced.

With restaurants, on the other hand, we all have a good idea about what constitutes good food and service and can judge for ourselves as the courses arrive.

Now, if you were doing a michelin/AA/georgina Campbell type operation where you sent cars to be serviced by guys who work for you, who could afterwards asses the car and asses and report on the quality of the service, that could be useful.

However, if all they were allowed to do was publish "good" reports and not tell us about the garages which are shysters, even that would seem of dubious value.

And that's the difference between what you propose and the Michelin/AA/Georgina Campbell type operations. They send experts to assess for the rest of us, and then report without being censored and told they can't include reports which are not good.

To invite anyone who wants to write a review to do so, when 99% of the people who will respond are probably not qualified to assess how good, bad or indifferent the servicing of their vehicle was, seems a little pointless. Especially when what is likely to happen is that the garages themselves, under the cloak of anonymity, will write under assumed names wonderful reviews of their own establishments. What good is that information to anyone?

cbyrne wrote: »

BTW, you have a chance of winning a Sat Nav system for all reviews posted in Feb and March

I bought my first GPS in 1999 having used a similar model to help find my way across africa in late 1998, and I still have it. Its a Garmin GPS III and such a wionderful tool!

cbyrne

jawlie wrote: »

Now, if you were doing a michelin/AA/georgina Campbell type operation where you sent cars to be serviced by guys who work for you, who could afterwards asses the car and asses and report on the quality of the service, that could be useful.

Believe it or not this is something I have thought about, and maybe its something we can do with a panel of 'experts' from somewhere like here, and have also thought about assessing garages ourselves with panel of reviewers and we would be more than happy to publish the full details good and bad as we can stand over these. But... thats a bit away just yet, haven't quite got the resources just yet

All your points are valid and have been considered, maybe bear with us and hopefully the site will evolve into something you consider worthwhile, we can but try, as they say Rome wasn't built in a day!

jawlie

cbyrne wrote: »

Believe it or not this is something I have thought about, and maybe its something we can do with a panel of 'experts' from somewhere like here, and have also thought about assessing garages ourselves with panel of reviewers and we would be more than happy to publish the full details good and bad as we can stand over these. But... thats a bit away just yet, haven't quite got the resources just yet

All your points are valid and have been considered, maybe bear with us and hopefully the site will evolve into something you consider worthwhile, we can but try, as they say Rome wasn't built in a day!

Well, I wish you well with it, even thought you don't address the points I made!

-Chris-

Just another thought... it may be of a help to get this rolling by promoting it to the service managers in all the dealers you want included in the survey - if you got their buy-in, it wouldn't be beyond the realms of imagination that when a person has their car serviced they'd be told "don't forget to recommend us on bestgarages.ie".

If they saw the value in it and saw it actually bringing in business, they'd promote it to their customers and you'd get a hell of a lot of posts continuously. If you're planning to have primarily organic growth through promoting it on forums or if you plan to advertise it nationally I don't think you'll get anywhere near the take-up you deserve.

cbyrne

AudiChris wrote: »

Just another thought... it may be of a help to get this rolling by promoting it to the service managers in all the dealers you want included in the survey - if you got their buy-in, it wouldn't be beyond the realms of imagination that when a person has their car serviced they'd be told "don't forget to recommend us on bestgarages.ie".

If they saw the value in it and saw it actually bringing in business, they'd promote it to their customers and you'd get a hell of a lot of posts continuously. If you're planning to have primarily organic growth through promoting it on forums or if you plan to advertise it nationally I don't think you'll get anywhere near the take-up you deserve.

Yeah this is also something I'm looking at, basically I wanted to get this up and running with comments from forums like these (which as you can see I value) and there are plans in exactly the method you mention. We want to encourage garages to 'want' to be listed in bestgarages.ie and they will know they can achieve this by encouraging their customers to put reviews up. I think the site is now ready to be publicised some more.

Jawlie, I think many of the comments you made have been made by others before too and I know these are issues. I don't really have a comeback to tell you that you are wrong, just that I see what your saying and hopefully can address these going forward. Thanks for the input tho.

jawlie

cbyrne wrote: »

We want to encourage garages to 'want' to be listed in bestgarages.ie and they will know they can achieve this by encouraging their customers to put reviews up. I think the site is now ready to be publicised some more.

.

How do you propose to stop these garages pretending to be "customers"??

-Chris-

jawlie wrote: »

How do you propose to stop these garages pretending to be "customers"??

How do you stop people bidding against themselves on Ebay, or submitting good reviews of books they've written on Amazon?

It's a fair query, but I can't see garages investing the time to vote for themselves more than once or twice, and if the site is any kind of a success that kind of trickery will be diluted by the hundreds of real answers.

CivilServant

AudiChris wrote: »

How do you stop people bidding against themselves on Ebay, or submitting good reviews of books they've written on Amazon?

It's a fair query, but I can't see garages investing the time to vote for themselves more than once or twice, and if the site is any kind of a success that kind of trickery will be diluted by the hundreds of real answers.

They won't need to, negative comments have already been removed.

The idea itself is a good, but if you can't put forward a balanced point of view (the good and the bad) it's no better than a giant annoying flash advert that makes a sound everytime you mouse-over it.

cbyrne

jawlie wrote: »

How do you propose to stop these garages pretending to be "customers"??

Pretty much answered as I would have by AudiChris - this is the same on tripadvisor / menupages etc. If there are enough reviews then it should negate the need to do this. That said, have some ideas to try reduce the likelihood of this in the future plans.

As regards CivilServant comments, don't really want to start repeating myself, but the aim of the site is for others to recommend/encourage others to use garages that provide what they consider good service - and in fact this has already happened on the site where people have taken a lead from another reviewer and used a garage on this basis (and from feedback they were glad they did). its early days yet and it takes a bit of time to gain momentum but when garages start to get repeat postive comments these are the ones which will get the business. Any negative comments will pull the rating of the garage back down however. long story short, it will take a while for this process to really kick in, but hopefully that will be soon. Naturally there is nothing really we can do to stop garages putting positive or negaive ratings in but I'm not really sure if they will be bothered, the cream should rise to the top naturally so they won't need to, and I don't think others will deliberately look to sabotage other garages and if they do we *should* be able to spot this.

I just encourage people to use it, add reviews if you have them and give it a chance!!! What do you have to lose?

cbyrne

CivilServant wrote: »

They won't need to, negative comments have already been removed.

We don't necessarily remove negative comments, if you look at some reviews on the site there are negative views there, but as you can understand we need to be careful with some of the stronger comments, and we reserve the right to edit these and are upfront about this. Every review is used to generate the average rating for a garage which decides it is displayed or not, this is due to the focus on our site being to only show the 'best' garages.

vox

Had a quick look at the site. Nice idea and could potentially be a very useful tool. Unfortunately the idea is weakened by your decision to not include negative reviews... this in my view makes it pretty pointless as only positive opinions can be expressed. I see you are looking for the garages to advertise on the site which is probably why you have removed all negative comments as you do not want to upset any potential clients. I hope you change your mind!

cbyrne

Hi vox, showing reviews or not has nothing to do with the advertising, like any site it needs to make some finanical return for the investment made in building it! Any potential advertising would come with the provisio that this will not affect what reviews are posted, and the gargage will have the right to withdraw advertising if and whenever they want (i.e. they get bad reviews!).

Again, and not to labour the point, the site is not a ratemygarage site, I have no interest in having a site full of negative comments and 'avoid at all costs' reviews.. I have had both bad and good service with my cars, and whenever anyone asks me wheres good to buy/service I tell them about the good places, i wouldn't even be bothered talking about the crap ones. This is what this site is meant to do too. Its not a concept that everyone agrees with but thats fair enough. I think when it takes off and gets plenty of reviews up it will make sense..

thanks for looking at it and the feedback tho

rupamede

Very sorry I bought a car from Randles, in 6 months car has been there 9 times. Many faults they did not fix the right way like the alternator that fell twice and the gears and the hinge of the door. They rather see if they can get away with temporary fixes and if need be only then they send for the parts. Anyone interested in my case in detail pls get in touch. They are also in this weeks Kerryman because two brothers from Ballybunnion are taking them to the High Court. Not only did they lie about being members on the SIMI they also lie about car's history since my car had given an inordinate amount of trouble in 2007 before I bought it. And I have the reports to prove that.

jawlie

rupamede wrote: »

Very sorry I bought a car from Randles, in 6 months car has been there 9 times. Many faults they did not fix the right way like the alternator that fell twice and the gears and the hinge of the door. They rather see if they can get away with temporary fixes and if need be only then they send for the parts. Anyone interested in my case in detail pls get in touch. They are also in this weeks Kerryman because two brothers from Ballybunnion are taking them to the High Court. Not only did they lie about being members on the SIMI they also lie about car's history since my car had given an inordinate amount of trouble in 2007 before I bought it. And I have the reports to prove that.

Had you been posting that on the new site that cbyrne is trying to promote on here, your "review" would not be allowed as they only allow positive reviews and delete negative reviews. having said that, how do we know it you are not an arch rival of this "Randles" hoping to create negative publicity for them in the hope that their rivals ( ie you) benefit?

audichris wrote: »

How do you stop people bidding against themselves on Ebay, or submitting good reviews of books they've written on Amazon?

.

I really have no experience of either ebay or amazon. My question is how do we assess whether or not these positive reviews come from the garage owners about their own garages? I note cbyrne has not addressed this point, and it seems evident that the possibility reduces the usefulness of his site and questions its value to potential users.

audichris wrote: »

...I can't see garages investing the time to vote for themselves more than once or twice, and if the site is any kind of a success that kind of trickery will be diluted by the hundreds of real answers.

.

It seems to be very little effort to write 15 or 20 reviews under different pseudonyms if it will generate business for their garages. How long does it take to post a comment here? If garages don't think it worthwhile to do this, then presumably thats becasue they think it not worthwhile.

It seems naive to think that garage owners would not be prepared to do this anonymously if it swelled their profits.

rupamede

"how do we know it you are not an arch rival of this "Randles" hoping to create negative publicity for them in the hope that their rivals ( ie you) benefit?"

If you read this week's Kerryman you will see that Randles are notorious for being dishonest. I am not the only one that had to get a solicitor and sue them. Facts are facts and intentions are intentions. I think it is a good thing that someone like me can actually give factual evidence of what I am saying. There's a newspaper and I also have in my power reports that are evidence of Randles Brothers fault. And I can produce them if asked.

Although I agree that we cannot allow every kind of reviews in that website, I think they should reconsider because it is important to open people's eyes to the facts. So when I posted that review I was thinking of helping people like myself who may get caught by these Randles (or should I say Rascalls) Brothers in Kerry.

It is important to have a good service but one cannot expect a good service if standards aren't met. That website obvioulsly makes no sense whatsoever, it does not help people and it can actually be like sand in people's eyes. Now the Kerryman's page about Randles and my review are factual things that can be of real help.

quarryman

was about to write a review about poor experience I had at a Dublin garage but won't bother now, since the negative reviews are removed.

This makes the site pointless, won't be back.

rupamede

quarryman wrote: »

was about to write a review about poor experience I had at a Dublin garage but won't bother now, since the negative reviews are removed.

This makes the site pointless, won't be back.

I cant understand why there isn't a site that allows us to complain about garages. There are sites like rateyourteacher and rateyoursolicitor so there should be one called rateyourgarage but there isnt

Cionád

quarryman wrote: »

was about to write a review about poor experience I had at a Dublin garage but won't bother now, since the negative reviews are removed.

This makes the site pointless, won't be back.

+1

This website is a waste of time imo