As if I had not enough problems (like my wife not being able yet to come to the US so no Christmas with her again), someone did t-bone my car yesterday, luckily no one was hurt and the damage was not bad enough to prevent me from driving the car.
So the other guy that collided with me was responsible and the insurance company accepted the responsibility of the costs of repair.
The company was very good at setting me with the claim and repair shop considerations, but the places that the operator recommended me where way too far from home.
Really?, I said, “all the way out of town?” Yes, the operator told me, those were the closest locations within a 15 mile radius.
I did go to the internet and the business locator they used. And indeed that was the case, but I was curious and decided to do the search “within 5 miles”. Lo and behold there were several locations closer to home.
I will report to them that using the default “within 15 miles” actually does search for locations that are around 15 miles and it omits closer locations on the first page it serves (You can find the closest locations in other pages but you have to hunt for them). I did look around for other business locator tools and most of their searches included the businesses closest to home.
So, the mundane thing here is just a public service announcement to all to be aware of how some business locators do work and how some agents could not be using the tool properly. Always ask the agent if other pages do point at a closer location, or better yet, see if you can use the tool yourself.
I encountered this with a bookstore once. They were an independent bookstore in a college town. I checked on Google Maps to see what their hours were and they weren’t listed. My assumption was that they had been another victim of the decline of print and had gone out of business. But when I later went to the town I found they were open. I was able to stop in, do my shopping, and inform them they were off the grid.
If I understand the situation correctly, the problem is not the help desk people. It’s the businesses involved not understanding “Search Engine Optimization”. (SEO) My step daughter, a very successful wedding photog, has explained this to me and cited examples of cross referencing your business through Twitter, Facebook and other social media. Success in this area is related to the words you use to describe your business and the order in which those words are used. SEO is not a fixed thing though. Google and other search engine providers make changes in how things link, so as a business owner, you’ve got to keep up on those tweaks. Sounds like a PITA, but it also sounds like “the way things are done” now.
“Closest” may mean different things to stupid search engines. The closest Fedex to Sister Bay, Wisconsin, is 25 miles away, so they say. That’s true if you have a boat or airplane, but it’s over 120 miles by car. You have to go around that big wet spot we call Green Bay.
To clarify: the beef is with the proprietary tool in their website that does use Google maps. It only showed in the first page the locations it found around 15 miles (not within), other pages had the locations I needed. (It seems that the operator in my call was just lazy and could not bother to click at the other page numbers). Using Google maps alone I found the auto body shop that the insurance website recommended right away in the zip code area that I entered in Google maps.
Sometimes if you google a restaurant, “helpful” info pops up on the right column about a nearby location, giving their hours and such. But apparently it’s bad at handling places open 24hrs part of the week. It claimed the local IHOP was closed on saturdays, when in fact they’re open 24hrs on that day. So yeah, internet, great and all, but sometimes you just gotta do your own “fact checking”.