30 Day Old Refund Policy

PULLC

@DustiO I would like an explanation and a response here, as this is not an uncommon issue experienced by many pros.

I have a client who I have been tracking down since they picked us on 3/11. I have called this client over 10 times, leaving a text after each attempt, and sent over 7 messages through Thumbtack and never received a response until yesterday, 4/15 for them to say that they found someone else for the job on 7/16.

I have literally attempted to contact this client regularly every 2-3 days to follow up on THEIR request that I was charged for.

Why did I pay $20.48 for this? I cannot believe that this was the vision that Thumbtack had when this platform was created.

My team has a system for follow ups and we actually work Thumbtack leads and attempt to move them through a process, as we have a CRM system in the background we use for tracking opportunities. Every lead is given an estimate and a call within minutes of receiving the lead, if they don't respond, then we set up a task in our CRM to follow up in 2 days until they tell us no or the event date passes.

If I had made contact with the client and they told me no up front, I am 100% ok with paying for that, why? Because my time isn't wasted. I have spent far more than the $20.48 to attempt to call the client for them to completely ghost me and then respond a month later after over 30 attempts to contact them. If I don't try to follow up, I lose out on the potential for business.

Thumbtack's job is to put us in front of prospective clients, and I am OK with that. I am NOT ok with donating money to Thumbtack. I have spent over $2000 this year and 60% of the inbound leads from this platform have been nonresponsive after their original inquiry. That means I've literally donated over $1400 to Thumbtack.

Something needs to change regarding the 30 day old policy, particularly when the event is more than 30 days away. I have had a lot of clients who input Thumbtack leads and completely forget about them, hence why we have a follow up system, as we have generated several sales this way, but for a client to completely not respond and then after a month say they found someone else should be a refundable situation.

Also, there needs to be some commitment from the client to respond within a certain time window regarding a decision otherwise we should receive money back, or implement a credits system on the client side. There is zero obligation from the client, and they in most cases do not know we get charged and they are exacerbating the problem. If the goal is to continue to charge the pros for every time the client wants to kick tires, then I, like many others, will re-allocate marketing funds to other platforms away from Thumbtack, because the ROI simply is not there anymore due to the inbound lead quality.

We want this platform to continue to work for us, so I am asking you, what is your specific plan to address this?

DustiO

Hi @PULLC thanks for posting, and for this really well thought out feedback. I would recommend also sending this via email to support@thumbtack.com to be sure this feedback gets logged, be sure to include the numbers you shared re: ROI (we're working on a suggestion box in the Community that will do this in the near future, but for now email is best). I know it can be extremely frustrating - as a former business owner I feel this. Here are some things that the team is working on now to address these pain points:

• Various ways to increase customer commitment and understanding
• Some different approaches to improving the experience with refunds

As soon as there are more concrete updates to share, I will do that. In the meantime I would say to keep doing what you're doing and contacting those customers - so you capture those who do hire you at a later date. And, I would recommend submitting refund requests within the 30-day mark, as you'll still have access to communicate with the customer in the event that they change their mind and decide to move forward later (hope that makes sense).

PULLC

@DustiO Thank you for responding! We will continue to work the leads as this platform has been 85% of our business, so we certainly want to continue to grow with Thumbtack! We look forward to updates as I believe the first bullet point is key.

There has to be some commitment from the client to actually engage in the process, otherwise this platform is merely an extension of Google Ads, and I don't think that was what was intended.