Sooner or later the odds are that you'll break your phone in one way or another, and when that happens you'll come across a pressing question; Are repair shops safe, and if so, which one do I use?
With the Right To Repair movement in full swing you'll have a variety of local and national phone repair shops to choose from. On top of that you'll also have the choice of choosing a small business repair shop or a manufacturer such as Apple.
The Safety
There's a few things to consider when thinking about safety, especially when we're dealing with devices that have your private data. Fortunately, these days it's pretty easy to assess whether a device repair shop is safe or not.
Reviews
If someone has had a good or bad experience, they're very likely to write such a thing on the world wide web. This could be on Google reviews, Trust Pilot, Facebook, and all social media. Check out a mix of the 1 star and 5 star reviews, and the average is also very important too.
For example, this is the Google Reviews for our Mount Isa store.
120 is a solid amount of reviews with a nice average. I'd be mindful of businesses that have exclusively 5 star, but have only 3 reviews in total. They might be a great business, but I'd take the reviews for a grain of salt because they don't give a big picture. Anything more than 20 reviews will give you a good snapshot. On the other end if you find a business with over 20 reviews but have an average of 3 stars or less I would generally stay away from that. The amount of reviews also indicate that the technicians working on your phone are trustworthy and won't be stealing your data.
Asking For Your Pin
It is general practice for a repair shop to ask for your pin code to unlock your device. This is purely to do some testing to make sure everything is running properly. For example, if we replace your battery, we'd need to unlock your phone afterwards to run some tests and diagnostics. Another example is if we replace your camera lens or glass then we need to ensure that your camera works.
Social Media
It's 2022, every man, woman, child and their dog is on social media. Whether it's Facebook, Instagram or TikTok. In my opinion, it doesn't matter how many followers they have, but do they respond to every or most comments? Are they posting frequently? Are they providing value? Social media posts are also a good place to watch out for negative comments. If people are constantly commenting to complain about their products, services and quality, that's something I would be careful about. This is all about their customer service. If they're customer service is good online, it will most likely be good offline and in person. One place to look for this in the Facebook review section. I'm sure most people reading this know how to access the Instagram comments section to find the interaction between the business and the customers.
Bringing Value
One way to see if a repair shop is trustworthy is seeing if they offer some form of warranty. For example, we offer a lifetime warranty on every single repair. This means that if we make a mistake and you don't know until later, we will make amends completely free of charge to you. We offer this because we're confident in our products and services. We're definitely not alone in offering this, other repair shops may offer 3, 6 or 12 month warranty. Warranty's are a great way to develop trust with the repair shop.
Long story short, there's a lot of factors involved in the safety side of things, but there's a high likelihood that a repair shop will be safe.
If you have any other questions, feel free to contact us!