A lot of people bemoan 'cheap Chinese junk' and then price compare for everything they buy.
I've learned not to price-compare to the level of the lowest cost out there (look at the flood of imported junk on Amazon with names we can't even pronounce, which push down the legit brands a few pages), but I do read a lot of reviews and find the best bang for the buck when I can. I don't take all reviews seriously, but if I start seeing trends in a product (the same problem across many of the reviews) then I know it's an issue.
And that makes me think of trying to find trustworthy reviews of service work.
It's just harder with service work to trust reviews as it is so subjective. Three people could get a hot water tank replaced, and let's assume it has the same quality of work on each. One could give five stars because, hey, he has hot water again and there's no leak. Another person could get the same exact repair and complain that the soldering was a little sloppy, the plumber left a mess behind (like maybe he forgot to pick up his empty spool of solder), and the tank has a small dent in it around the back where it can't normally be seen. A third might write a review saying his new tank started leaking after a year and a half.
So who do you trust there? One doesn't care because it's working, and maybe the installation was a little sloppy but he's either ignorant, or doesn't really care since it's out of sight anyway. The second could nitpick everything in life and never be satisifed...or maybe it really
was that sloppy. The third could have been a defective unit from the manufacturer that wasn't even a result of the plumber's work.
When ours went out here early last year, I told the landlord that there was a long-established plumbing company up the street from us, since our usual HVAC guy was booked and couldn't get to it. I'm sure the job was expensive, but they did a good job on it and brought everything up to code. When the city inspector arrived, he saw which company did the work, recognized the plumber's name, and told me that they never have a problem with any of the work they have seen from this company.