We feel like TalkLocal has a lot to offer, not just for the average consumer, but also for service professionals and businesses. The idea for the website started because GP was frustrated with the lack of return on his advertising costs with his computer repair company Geeks-on-Site. He spent lots of money on ads and he had no clue how much money the ads were giving him. There was no way to advertise with a high ROI (Return on Investment). He assumed that many other SMB’s and service professionals shared his frustrations, so he decided that lots of them would be interested in using a website which reliably brought them customers for a small fee.

And thus the idea for TalkLocal was born. With TalkLocal, business only pay when they TALK to a consumer. Before deciding whether they want to talk to the customer, they can hear the location, problem, and time the customer wants to be service. It is only then when they decide if they want to talk to the customer and pay a fee. Best of all, they decide the fee that they pay. Looking at it from a Geeks-on-Site perspective, TalkLocal is a great deal for GP. He converts a very high percentage of his connections into sales, and he gets to decide the fee he pays.  If GP isn’t getting phone calls, he isn’t paying money. This is a big difference from his Cost per Click ads on Google, where he pays whenever a customer clicks on the ad, even if they don’t ever end up calling.

TalkLocal is a system that benefits consumers and service professionals. We are simply paving a dirt road. Customers waste time trying to find the right service provider, and service providers waste money trying to find customers. TalkLocal eliminates that waste and benefits everyone!

We want to incorporate local reviews and ratings into TalkLocal. Consumers spend a lot of time looking up online reviews to find out which service professional or business is best for them. If we’re in the business of saving time, then we should do that for them. We think the best option would be to display reviews for each company from every main review site on the status page. We’re going to put the changes up and see how consumers respond.

We also want to incorporate local reviews and ratings into the TalkLocal Quality scoring system called the Seva Score, which is the deciding factor into what companies get called first. If a company has good reviews, then it only makes sense that they get called earlier. With this, we can further ensure that we are connecting consumers to respected companies that will get the job done.

We have been thinking of changing the current TalkLocal four step process to three steps, and eliminating the step where consumers pick companies.  This is in the interest of saving time, having consumers pick which companies to call just doesn’t make sense in almost all cases. Another problem which has come up using the three step process is that once the consumers gets to the page where they view which companies they can pick, they started calling the companies themselves.

To a consumer who is used to using yellow pages and similar processes to find a service provider, they were too used to calling a company the second they saw a phone number. Getting rid of the process made it possible for us to complete the goal of our website, actually calling companies for consumers.

Since our goal is to connect consumers to companies as quickly as possible, we officially decided to change to the process to three steps. In the rare case that a consumer does want to specifically eliminate or choose companies, they will still have this option in the Advanced Search section.