What service experience can and cannot establish
Reliable information should help customers understand a provider's background without promising more than the available evidence supports.
Completed work and service capability
Evidence of completed work can support a statement that a provider has performed a particular activity.
The strength of that statement depends on whether the work records are relevant, correctly interpreted and attributable to the provider.
A general service claim and a specific historical experience claim should be distinguishable.
Experience does not guarantee outcomes
Prior experience with comparable work does not guarantee that a future customer's problem will have the same cause, price, duration or outcome.
A professional assessment may still be necessary before the provider can recommend a service or quote.
Historical pricing requires context
Historical prices can vary considerably between otherwise similar jobs.
Material costs, labour, location, scheduling, site access, service scope and the age of the records can all influence comparability.
Published historical price information, where appropriate, should explain its basis and limitations.
Customer confidentiality matters
Customers should be able to understand a provider's relevant experience without exposing private details from somebody else's job.
Public statements should respect privacy, commercial confidentiality and the provider's publication approvals.
Accuracy matters more than volume
A long list of service claims is not automatically more useful than a smaller collection of clear, relevant statements.
Service information should remain specific enough to be meaningful, accurate enough to be trusted and understandable to ordinary customers.
Using this information
The examples in this directory explain the types of customer questions that Service Evidence aims to help businesses answer.
They are educational illustrations, not endorsements of particular suppliers or guarantees of service availability.