“Award-winning” in this category usually means a directory listing that costs a few hundred pounds a year, or a trophy from an organisation that exists to sell trophies. We are not going to put those in a row and hope you do not check.
What follows instead: the third-party signals we can point at, the standards we set ourselves with whether we actually met them, and a list of the recognition we have turned down.
Each stated with what it is actually worth, because a signal presented without its limitations is a badge by another name.
Public rating on a platform we do not control, cannot edit and cannot remove reviews from. The one- and two-star reviews are visible there and reproduced on our own reviews page.
Real, but ratings on any platform are gameable by volume. Read the low ones.
Every one- and two-star review we have received, shown at the top of our reviews page with a named reply rather than a template.
A page we chose to build. Weaker as evidence than the platform, stronger than a badge.
We have never bought a trust mark, an award placement, a "top 10" listing, or a spot on a comparison site that charges for ranking.
Verifiable by absence — and by how much emptier this page is than a competitor’s.
Attributable quotes given to journalists, including for pieces critical of the sector. Most operators in this category will not do this at all.
Small but hard to fake — the pieces are published under someone else’s masthead.
Self-set targets are weaker evidence than an external audit. They are still stronger than a badge, provided the misses are printed too.
| Standard | Target | Latest | Met? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every order gets a second read | 100% | 100% | Met |
| Delivered work audited blind | 10% | 11.4% † | Met |
| Audits scoring 4.0 or above | 95% | 94.1% † | Missed |
| Delivered on or before deadline | 99.5% | 98.7% † | Missed |
| First reply to a client message | Within 2 hours | 1h 42m median † | Met |
| Late deliveries refunded automatically | 100% | 100% | Met |
The misses stay on the page. A standards table with no failures in it is a marketing asset, not a report.
Each of these has been offered to us, and each would have looked good here.
Worth being straight about: some recognition is closed to a business like this one.
The quarterly figures are published in full, including the quarter our on-time rate slipped and why.