Reviews

Stop Asking Every Customer For Reviews

Blast every customer with a review request and you will collect the opinions of the people with the strongest feelings. Some of those feelings are bad.

The standard advice is to ask every customer for a review. It is close to right and the gap matters.

Short answer

An untargeted blast reaches the delighted, the indifferent, and the annoyed at the same moment. The indifferent ignore it. The other two both respond, because strong feeling is what makes someone act. You have built a machine that harvests your best and worst experiences at the same rate.

Ask, but ask in the right order

Find out how the job went before you point anyone at a public review form. A single question by text does it: how did we do, one to five.

4

Four or five

Send the review link. This person is glad you asked and the request will not annoy them.

3

Three or below

A human calls them. Something went wrong and you now have a chance to fix it while it is still fixable.

Where the line is

Routing unhappy customers to a private conversation instead of a public form is fine. Blocking them from leaving a public review is not, and platforms treat it as a policy violation. The difference is whether the review link still works if they go looking for it. It should.

A low rating is not the disaster

A profile with nothing but five stars reads as fake to most people, and shoppers routinely go straight to the negative ones to see how a company behaves under pressure. A calm, specific reply to a bad review does more for a hesitant buyer than another perfect score.

What actually hurts is a bad review with no reply. That reads as a company that either did not notice or did not care.

Timing beats volume

Ask while the job is still fresh, the same day where you can. A request that arrives two weeks later competes with everything that has happened since, and loses.

One number to never hardcode

If your website displays a star rating or a review count, pull it live rather than typing it in. Hardcoded numbers drift, and a figure on your site that disagrees with your public profile is a problem you created for yourself.

Start by finding out where you actually stand

Find out what Google and ChatGPT say.

Book 15 minutes and we will look you up live: where you rank, what your Google profile is missing, and whether AI assistants name you when someone asks for what you sell.

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