Who can help test our new Product Recall Report?

Hello everyone,

Who could help me with testing out our almost-done Product Recall Report and provide me your feedback?

I’m a designer at a software company and we’re close to finishing a new report that I designed. We’re not originally a home inspection software company, but we’ve been getting some great feedback about this new Product Recall Report, so I’m here to see if indeed this would be helpful to your business or not.

It works by scanning product nameplates/labels using our app, and in return we identify the product and look up if it’s recalled. We also identify the age of the item and the remaining useful life. Plus our app has all the manuals, documents, parts, and how-to-videos for most appliances and heating and cooling equipment.

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Going up against the Gnat? I may help you there. What is this exactly? Is it RecallAlert?

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Hi Scot, thanks for wanting to help! The company is called Centriq. We have been making a consumer app for a few years and just now realized the information we have is helpful to inspectors and your clients.

As a new user I’m not allowed to upload documents yet, otherwise I’d show you what the report looks like.

I’ll see if I can link to it somewhere. Since it’s not quite finished yet we don’t have it up on our website yet.

Here we go. Here’s a link to a sample of the report. I’d love to get a couple of inspectors test it out making their own reports and let me know how it goes!

Let me know who’s up for testing it and I’ll get you set up (Scot, I’ll DM you with the info).

HI Scot,

I guess as a newbie I’m not allowed to DM either. So I’ll just drop this here, and anyone else who’d like to test it can follow right along.

You can set up an account by following this link:
https://mycentriq.app.link/centriq-pro
This will walk through a couple of screens to set up your Pro account. The info you enter is what will show up on your reports as your brand.

Make sure that when you get to the screen with the price on it you scroll down (inside that little panel) and enter the Trade Code “TryMeFree” (without the quotation marks). It’ll still ask for a credit card but your price is $0.00 so nothing gets billed.

UPDATE: this may be easier to follow along to create your account:

Then, here’s a quick guide on how to use it at the beginning, during, and after an inspection. The report gets triggered when you transfer a home from your account to the home owner. Both you and the home owner get a copy.

I’m happy to help you get setup on the phone or on a video call. Let me know if you get stuck anywhere. All feedback is welcome and your help testing is much appreciated!

So do I have to give you my credit card info

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Marc, normally yes. But I can see why you wouldn’t want to. Alternatively, go through the setup until you reach the credit card screen and instead of providing your card let me know what email you signed up with and I can try to make it complete you profile without one from my end.

UPDATE: You can email me your account email so you don’t have to put that here publicly: edwin@centriqhome.com

Actually, that is only part of the problem.
You are a Non-member, and you are also a Vendor posting outside of the Vendor allowed section!

I recommend you contact InterNachi to resolve your issues before you get booted and banned!

Hi Jeffrey,

I’m not here to upset anyone or anything. My apologies if I posted in the wrong location. It seemed to be the most logical place for this.

I’m here on a guest account, and looking for input. I hope that’s ok. I’ll be sure to convert to a vendor account if indeed we have a product worth selling. Right now, I’m just trying to get a sense if what we have is ready, or even close to ready. I hope you’ll give it a try and let me know.

Thanks!

Sound interesting, Edwin. What we could do is an InterNACHI Webinar together. I’ll host. You present. See what interest there is. At the end of the webinar, be sure to provide some call-to-action for InterNACHI members and an exclusive discount for them. The webinar will be video recorded and uploaded to all of our social media channels and our InterNACHI Home Inspector Podcast. I also recommend taking advantage of the benefits of being an InterNACHI Vendor. If you’re interested in doing a webinar, please email Moranda at moranda@internachi.org. She my Events Coordinator and manages our InterNACHI Webinar schedule. How’s that sound to ya?

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That sounds like a lot of fun, @bgromicko1! I was working my way to becoming a vendor, as we’re still putting the final touches on it. I am mostly just looking for feedback and some people to run it through its paces. But in a few weeks I think we’re ready for prime time. I’ll reach out to Moranda to get something scheduled.

Thanks again, Ben. I look forward to it.

See you then.

Edwin, which databases do you search for recalls. Is this any different than a CPSC search or a model/serial number search on a manufacturer’s website?

Hi Darren,

Yes and no. For the recall part (which is only 10% of the info in the report) it’s sort of what you describe, except we don’t do it once, we do it every minute. So even if you searched it today and it got recalled tomorrow, you’ll still be alerted.

We’ve built our own database from the information from the CPSC and continue to ingest data from there. We’re also working on integrating with the NHTSA, because some consumer products are covered by them rather than the CPSC.

There’s much more to it than that though, and it’s one of the things we are wondering if we should change: we named it the Recall Report, but it’s only one of 12 data points we have on most items. So maybe it should be called the Product Insights Report or Product Intelligence Report.

Here’s an example of what’s in it:

This is a recalled clothes washer from Samsung, there is a page full of details on that recall later in the report. The manufacturing date was not on the product label photo, but we extracted it by decoding the serial number. We have those decoding keys for about 50 major brands today, and we keep reverse engineering these for other brands.

With a manufacturing date, we know the age of this washer. And we know how many years roughly a washer is good for, so we can predict an approximate remaining useful life. This, in my opinion, is just as valuable as the recalled status, because it helps plan replacement expenses, and helps decide when something is broken if it’s worth investing to fix, or if you’re better of just replacing it.

And then we’ve looked up the typical warranty for the different appliance types for the major manufacturers. This way, with the age, we can see if the appliance is still under warranty or not.

Finally, and in my opinion this is where the real magic is, in the right column you see what information is available in our free app. In this case there are 3 how-to videos, 4 manuals and documents, and 273 parts.

No more junk drawer filled with manuals and booklets and warranty cards, just one app with everything you need to maintain your home.

I could go on about the features of the app, like maintenance reminders, and storing receipts, and direct links for parts on Amazon, and having more parts than you’ll find at Home Depot, but you get the idea.

Try it out and let me know what you think of it!

i love it what a great attachment to a report.

Sounds like a nice addition but to much for my blood. I was thinking 20 to 30 dollars per month.

Did I miss it? How much??

Thanks, Alan. I love hearing you love it!

And I hear you on the price. Unfortunately, we can’t offer it for a fixed monthly fee because we have a hard cost to every report. Not only do we have an ongoing cost of keeping our database current with the latest recalls, every report places a demand on our products catalog as well. Because, even though we now have almost half a million products in our database, which covers about 80% of the things people add, we still need to fill the gap on the remaining 20%.

And for each product we add to our database, it’s not just the ongoing recall monitoring we do. We add the manuals and documents you’d find in the box when you bought the product, we add parts and accessories (sometimes hundreds of parts), and we add any helpful videos on use and maintenance of that specific brand and model. All if this is then available in our app, that comes included with the report.

This new product addition work is a human effort that’s hard to fully automate, and we pride ourselves in curating it manually. We don’t restrict the kinds of products you or your client can add either. As long as it has a brand and model, we will add the documents, parts and videos for it. And your clients can add their own products after the inspection, which too carries a cost that is partially offset by the price we charge for the report.

The report will be available to all our app users for $29.95, so the $17.95 trade pricing is a significant discount in comparison. Plus Ben asked me to work on a NACHI exclusive discount, so I’m working to see what I can shave off further.

Wherever the price ends up though, I recognize it will always have an impact in your profitability. I imagine however—and I’m curious if you agree—that the additional value you deliver would warrant an increase in what you charge for the inspection by at least the same amount and more likely a multiple. And if not, it could be offered as an up-sell, again at a multiple of the cost, with virtually no additional effort.

Lastly, it’s free to you who are here now, because I’m looking for your feedback on how easy it is to use, how useful the report is, how much your clients and those that refer you business appreciate it, and indeed on price too. If you’re signing up through the process outlined above, make sure to use the Trade Code “TryMeFree” (without the quotation marks) to zero out the price, or if you rather want to skip entering a credit card altogether, DM me once you reach the credit card screen and give me the email address you used to set up your account. I can go in and complete your account without requiring the card.

Thanks again for checking it out and sharing your feedback. I hope you’ll give it a spin and share your thoughts!

Is that per home inspection report?

That’s how I read it.