We’ve all come across those online ads and local newspaper ads from independent local locksmiths offering fast response time and a 24 hours emergency call out services and most large cities have an large quantity of emergency locksmiths on hand but what about people who live or work in the countryside and more rural sparsely populated areas? Is this fast response time still guaranteed and what is a fast response time anyway? 30 minutes? 1 Hour? 2 Hours?
Let’s us first decide what most of us would call a fast response time for a local locksmith? You find yourself locked out of your home, business or even your vehicle and need to get into your home, get into the office or get to that meeting on time and find yourself locked out of your office home or your vehicle.
You will want to call out an emergency 24 hour locksmith as soon as you can and you’ll also want to use a person or company who will be with you quickly and when asked what they would regard as an common fast response time most people say within the hour, on the other hand, some people say within 30 minutes, but even in the city this can be a bit optimistic as it can depend on teh trafic and the time of day so lets stick with under an hour because under an hour can be 50 minutes, 45 minutes, 30 minutes or even less depending on your location.
Let’s say you live or work in a more out of the way rural area, say Kendal, Cumbria, up in the beautiful lake district for example, it’s quite a rural hard to reach area so you probably wouldn’t find a locksmith based there so you’ll probably be looking at getting a locksmith to come out to you from the nearby cities of Lancaster or Morecambe which are more built up areas, now you wouldn’t search these large cities you would still search for Kendal itself and see what locksmith if any covers Kendal because many locksmiths only work in the city where the money is and don’t really like to drive out to rural areas, if they do then they will probably have your town or village listed on their website
However, many locksmiths will welcome the work and don’t see the distance or the fact that you live in a m ore rural as being an issue because once the locksmith leaves the city the roads open up there is less traffic and the distance becomes less of a problem in fact it can take longer to get to some inner city job due to traffic and congestion.
So what about all the negative reports and reviews you read on trusted trader type websites where a local locksmith has taken literally to get to a property, vehicle or business that was only 10 miles ways from the locksmiths so called base of operations?
There are a number of reasons why this would happen, one reason is that the locksmith didn’t set off when he or she claimed they would and instead waited for traffic to die down, leaving you standing outside of a locked property, business or vehicle for hours. At the end of the day this is just poor customer service plain and simply and these locksmiths deserve the bad reviews they are getting online.
Another and more alarming reason is that you didn’t contact a local locksmith at all and had the bad luck of contacting one of those national locksmith call centres. These are not independent locksmiths, they are simply call centres who market their service across the country claiming to have a locksmith in every town and village across the United Kingdom when in fact they employ no locksmiths at all and simply contact – for a cut of the profits – the nearest local locksmith on their books, sometime sending a locksmith from 50, 100 or even 150 miles away after duping the customer into thinking that hey had contacted a local independent locksmith from around the corner. One review I read recently was from business in Leigh, Greater Manchester who couldn’t lock up their premises do to a faulty lock. They have the misfortune of ringing a call centre and where left waiting over 5 hours being constantly lied to every time they rang the call centre back to ask where he was and when the locksmith finally arrived around 10pm (the business was meant to close at 5.30pm) it was revealed that he had travelled all the way from Leicester and was only given the job 2 hours ago…
Regrettably for the customer these types of national locksmith companies charge 4 or 5 time the rate charged by a genuine local locksmith for the same job so after waiting much longer than they expected they got a massive invoice too.
So how do you avoid the national locksmith call centres?
Unfortunately, It can be difficult especially when you are in a hurry and simply call the first number that appears in a Google search but there are a number of tell tale signs like a national telephone number instead of a local area code you recognise or a generic corporate looking website that doesn’t really tell you who the locksmith is or where he/she is actually based
A genuine independent locksmith will more than likely have a telephone number with a local area code as well as a mobile phone number for when they are about and about, national call centre tend to have one national or freephone number and no mobile. They also tend to have a more personalised website showing them or their vehicle… another sign that tells you that it’s a genuine local locksmith is when their website says “no call out fee” as most local independent don’t charge a callout fee whereas the call centres do so that they can bump up the price even more.
So even though you may need a locksmith as soon as possible it’s probably a good idea to spend 5 minutes or so checking out the locksmith results rather that getting stung and left waiting by a call centre. It’s also a good idea the avoid the paid listings too as it’s generally the call centres who pay for these where as an independent locksmith won’t have the funds