Here are frequently asked questions that we have gathered from our community as we continuously build it.
| Why is it called Circle's Choice? |
According to American Heritage® Dictionary,
- Circle means a group of people sharing an interest, activity, or achievement: Circle of Friends.
- Choice implies broadly the freedom to choose from a set: Freedom of Choice.
Hence is our name. :-)
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| What is Circle's Choice - how is different? |
Circle's Choice is kind of like a personalized Yellow Pages plus Consumer Reports, or a free and open Angie's List for local service recommendations, based on consumers' ratings and reviews, your friends' opinions, and your personal preferences. Circle's Choice is different and unique in many ways.
- Categories Important to Your Life
We focus on service categories that are important to your daily needs, including home, car, personal, kids, and pets, with extended business profiles on local "hidden gems". This is different from the Yellow Pages, which list just names and phone numbers.
- Ratings and Reviews of Great Local Services
We focus on LOCAL services, such as contractors, auto mechanics, dentists, pediatricians, and dog walkers, and emphasize GREAT ones who you should use. This is different from Consumer Reports, which is for products, and Better Business Bureau, which is mostly for finding out who not to use.
- Best of Both Worlds - Local Services and Online Products
Besides great local services, we also recommend complementary products and deals from online merchants, so you get the best of both worlds!
- Social Recommendations from Friends and Neighbors
We focus on your social circle of friends to live a better life - your friends' opinions carry more weight!
- Truly Personalized Recommendations
Well, we are unique here. :-) You are unique too, aren't you? We personalize recommendations just for you based on your unique preferences for cost, quality, timeliness, and usage pattern for local services.
- FREE plus Coupons and Rewards
We are not only FREE, but also work with local service business and online merchants for discounts and specials for you. We'll share profits with you through our Points Rewards Program too!
=> If this makes sense to you, please join us now; or please kindly offer your feedback how we could better serve you. Thanks!
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| What is the main difference between Circle's Choice and Angie's List? |
| Circle's Choice is like a free and open Angie's List plus social and personalized recommendations. Last time we checked, Angie's List charges $10.00 signup fee and $6.95 every month or $53.00 for 1 year for Boston chapter. As a closed paid-member only system, Angie's List has a small user base for each city (on average about 5K per major city) and therefore limited reviews for each local business and category. Angie's List is no doubt useful and some people could argue "it charges money, so it must be better." :-) We were inspired by Angie's List too, however, we believe a FREE & OPEN platform drives more usage, improves quality overtime, and adds more value to end users. Circle's Choice also moderates reviews, deters frauds, and makes the site more useful for you. You can read reviews on us too.
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| What is the main difference between Circle's Choice and ServiceMagic? |
| At Circle's Choice, you choose whom and when to contact after doing some research and reading some reviews. At ServiceMagic, when you go through its standard process and submit your request, 3 or more businesses who contract with ServiceMagic will be notified immediately for a fee to contact you, usually quite fast since they compete for the lead, whether you may or may not like them or want the calls immediately. Most businesses on ServiceMagic are larger firms or national and regional chains, which have little overlap with mostly small and family run local "hidden gems" on Circle's Choice. ServiceMagic is useful too especially if you want someone to call you soon. We believe many of you like to make your own choices - Circle's Choice helps you find the right ones based on real customer reviews, your friends' opinions, and your personal preferences.
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| How did Circle's Choice get started? |
We don't really like to talk about ourselves - it is all about You! But since so many people asked, here is a short version of a long story. :-)
- When I ("a co-founder") bought my first house and had my first wonderful baby boy in 2005, I was overwhelmed and frustrated by the difficulty in finding great local services, such as plumbers, contractors, nannies, pediatricians. I thought there had to be a better way than the Yellow Pages!
- I wrote the original business plan in 2005 while doing an MBA at the Babson entrepreneurship program. It evolves, even today.
- One day, I watched a Stanford commencement speech by Steve Jobs ... Long story short, Circle's Choice started. :-)
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| Who are the typical users of Circle's Choice? |
| We don't and will never disclose any personally identifiable information of our users. Statistically, most of our users are well-educated, well-paid professionals from late 20s to early 50s, live in metro suburban towns, own houses and cars, have family, kids, or pets. They are usually busy with work and family, but always in needs of great local services to improve their quality of life. |
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| Is Circle's Choice truly free for consumers? |
| Yes, absolutely! It is actually much more than FREE since you can earn REWARDS too. Please check out our Points Rewards Program for more details on how to earn rewards. |
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| How does Circle's Choice make money? |
| As a company, we make money by providing services helping local businesses better attract and retain customers and stand out among competitors through local online marketing. Circle's Choice is a FREE & OPEN online community that serves as an unbiased platform for consumers to rate and review local service businesses. Based on consumer ratings, we choose to only work with those local businesses that are already doing a good job and make them much better. It is extremely important to note that, to avoid any conflicts of interest, we do not and will not rate and review our clients on Circle's Choice as a company. We believe it should be your choice which business to choose based on real reviews from real customers and your preferences. |
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| How should I make referrals to earn rewards? |
The best approach is to login first and then simply send invitations through "My Circle", "My Referrals", or "Tell a Friend" where we can keep track of your referral automatically. If you prefer using your own email, you can copy & paste the following code - you still need to login first to be able to see your referral id below.
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| Who are the targeted businesses on Circle's Choice? |
| Circle's Choice focuses on great local service businesses especially those for home and family needs. A majority of them are small local businesses, used to be "hidden gems", and now recommended by customers who have used their services before. |
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| Can I add a new business? If so, how? |
Sure - Circle's Choice is an open system like Wiki. We suggest you either browse or search and try to locate the business first. If you find it, you can update the business info on its summary page. If you can't find it, you will see a link like this at the top of each category or search result page.
Add New Business
After adding the new business, don't forget to write reviews or invite customers to do so in order for us to amplify and accelerate word-of-mouth referrals! However, we reserve the right to keep or remove any business listing on our site.
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| Can I write both good and bad reviews? |
| The short answer is yes - it is always your choice! With this said, Circle's Choice does focus on GREAT local service businesses who you should use (vs. Better Business Bureau would be a better place to rule out who not to use.) Also, please comply with our suggested Review Guidelines - all reviews are moderated by a real person. |
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| How come most businesses seem to have positive reviews? |
| Your observation is correct. Circle's Choice focuses on "RECOMMENDATIONS from friends", which is different from other generic review sites. Most of our users come here to look for recommendations from friends, or to recommend great local services that they have used before. On the other hand, Better Business Bureau focuses on COMPLAINTS, which is useful if you want to figure out who not to use when you do your homework before hire. |
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| Can I completely trust recommendations on Circle's Choice? |
| Our philosophy is "trust but verify". Circle's Choice is a great starting point and advisory tool but it should not replace you do your own homework. At Circle's Choice, we do our best to moderate each review to ensure its trustworthiness and deter frauds, both in terms of real human efforts and computer algorithms. But still there is no 100% guarantee there is no fraud - a small percentage of people always try to "cheat" the system. We thus allow users to vote on the usefulness and report abuse of the reviews in order to leverage collective intelligence. Even everything else is equal, different people still could have different experiences with the same service simply because of different tastes and preferences. Our expectation is that recommendations should become more and more useful and personalized over time. |
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| I have trouble changing the star ratings, how to fix it? |
| Changing the star ratings requires JavaScript. Default settings of all popular web browsers would have JavaScript enabled. If you have trouble, it's most possibly because JavaScript is not currently enabled in your browser. Simply google "enable JavaScript in a web browser" will find online instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser. |
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| Is the Circle's Choice website secure? |
Yes, definitely. Circle's Choice has implemented Secure Socket Layer (SSL) for sensitive information (e.g. password) transmission over the Internet. Here is our verified secure site seal.
Furthermore, your password is hashed/encrypted in our database, so even we can't retrieve it. If you ever forget your password, you must reset it. |
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| Which browser would you recommend to use? |
| The site is best viewed with a screen resolution of 1024x768 and above using Mozilla Firefox, which we use for most of our development and testing. Of course, Internet Explorer also works. Apple users can use Safari too.
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| How do I link to Circle's Choice? Where can I find the logo? |
To link to us, simply cut and paste the following code to your web page.
It will appear on your page as:
Recommended Local Services | Circle's Choice
You can follow the links here to download a larger logo or a smaller one. |
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| How may I help Circle's Choice? |
| The best way to help Circle's Choice is to help spread the word - your family, your friends, your neighbors, your colleagues, your company, your non-profits, and your local service businesses - and everyone wins! As you can see from our Points Rewards Program, your effort will earn you rewards too. |
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| More questions ... |
| Just ask. :-) |
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