Finding someone to perform some small task for you isn't that tricky, so long as you live in a reasonably populated area and, more importantly, your greater community likes to rate and review contractors, handymen, and laborers on Yelp (to name a few examples).
What's trickier is finding out which contractor is the best fit for whatever it is you're trying to have done. Most Yelp reviews are often filled with lots of praise (or criticism) about a person's performance on other tasks, but it might not be an apples-to-apples comparison with whatever it is you're trying to have done. Worse, most reviews usually offer a generic description of the cost of said person's services—it's common to see phrases like "reasonably priced," instead of an actual description of the specific price (or hourly rate) a particular person charges.
Yelp has officially debuted a new feature that allows various businesses—typically, a person or a team of people—to give you an exact quote for whatever it is you're looking to have done. It's a bit of a spin on the service's "Message a Business" feature, which would allow to you accomplish the same thing via a conversation. In this case, you're just requesting pricing info, which should make it easier (and quicker) for businesses to respond to the query.
Even better, Yelp users can actually solicit a quote from up to 10 different businesses at once. So, you won't have to copy and paste messages for everyone. You'll just need to click on said businesses in the pop-up window that you type your quote request into, and whatever you send out will go to everyone.
This feature won't be new to some Yelp users. As Buzzfeed notes, the service has been testing the new "Request a Quote" option since September of last year. And it's also going to force businesses to be a bit more mindful of their communications—if they opt-in to the "Request a Quote" option.
Yelp is currently tracking businesses' response rates and the time it takes them to respond to a query, which those messaging the business can see. The figure also appears on Yelp's search results for any businesses that have agreed to receive quote requests.
According to Yelp, moving to "Request a Quote" from "Message a Business" for some businesses has already increased response rates from business owners 250 percent. Half of all the quote requests customers sent in received a received a response from a business within 24 hours.
The new feature is currently live on both iOS and the Web, and Yelp says that it'll be rolling out to Android users over the next few days.
Source: pcmag.com
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