You want the most reliable possible company in charge of keeping tabs on your health and well being. For that reason, we look into each company’s history and consider how long they’ve been in business, whether you’re likely to be dealing with a single company or a franchise with multiple independent businesses, and whether the company has national reach.
What services does the company provide? Do they offer help with a wide variety of pests, or do they specialize in only a few? Do they offer low-impact, organic, or low-toxicity approaches? How well do they train their technicians? Do they provide a guarantee, will they do additional treatments if the first isn’t effective, and (for termite treatments) will they pay for damage if they miss an infestation? We look into all these different aspects and rate them on the services they offer.
We take the legwork out of looking at online customer reviews by reading a wide sample and summarizing them for you. We look in particular at three important categories for pest control: punctuality—whether technicians show up on time as promised, persistence—whether you can rely on the company to take care of your problem, and effectiveness—whether a company was routinely able to take care of a pest problem in their first treatment. We get a sense of the “word on the street” about the company, and turn it into a rating
Pest control costs vary widely between rural and urban areas, by geography, and depending on what pest needs exterminating. This makes it hard to standardize pricing, but we look out for outliers. We also look at whether the company facilitates smart shopping by providing free estimates, whether they require you to sign an annual contract, and what sort of refunds and guarantees they offer to back up their work.