Locksmith Call centres
It is very easy for the general public to be tricked into calling a national locksmith instead of a genuine local locksmith. National locksmiths usually operate out of call centres and use as many under hand techniques as they think they can get away with to get unsuspecting members of the public to call them. Many of these so called locksmith companies also cover every other trade you can imagine, claiming to be expert locksmiths, plumbers, glaziers, joiners, gas engineers, electricians etc.
For example if you do a Google search for locksmiths Macclesfield you will see the shaded boxes at the top of the page and adverts running down the right hand side of the page, these are paid listings. All the parts in the middle with the white background are known as organic listings which your local locksmiths work hard to stay near the top of results and it does take a lot of time and effort. Many of the company’s which use these paid adverts are national locksmiths although not all of them, the majority usually are.
The national locksmiths pay their way to the top so basically there adverts show higher up than your local locksmiths so they are more likely to be clicked on when a customer has no time to double check the full details of a locksmith. It is very expensive to get a paid advert to the top and as mentioned earlier most of these companies are trying to cover many areas, so there advertising costs are massive! So how do they get this money back? The only way is by charging customers very high fees, when they give out prices they may have hidden charges - making themselves look more inexpensive compared your local Macclesfield locksmith who probably gave you a more genuine estimate including locks, labour VAT etc.
When the national company carry out the work, you are expecting a bill for the price quoted over the phone then you are hit with a huge bill which includes the charge quoted over the phone which usually doubles when they spin a 10 minute job out to make it last 2 hours plus parts, materials, and VAT, turning what sounded like a bargain on the phone into a very expensive mistake! they will have taken a credit card number, so can avoid negotiations!
Why do people call national locksmiths instead of a Macclesfield Local Locksmith?
This will usually be because the company displays a local phone number so people just assume they are local but what they probably don’t realise is that a phone number for any area code can be easily and cheaply obtained . Most customers will call the number at the top of Google because a lot of locksmith work is on an emergency basis (sometimes known as a "distress purchase") and doesn’t have enough time to search through all the listings but if this article just stops one person being ripped off by a national it will be a good thing.
most interesting. did you know many locksmiths have criminal records? this is not illegal!
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