Your Busiest Month Is Your Worst Month For Reviews, And That Is Backwards

Pull up your reviews and sort them by date. Then think back to which months were the hardest.

For most local businesses those two lists do not line up. They invert. Your slowest stretch produced a nice steady drip of reviews. Your busiest month, the one where you served more people than any other month of the year, produced almost nothing.

More customers. Fewer reviews. That is not a small oddity. That is the single most valuable month of the year going in the trash.

Why it happens, and none of the reasons are laziness

The ask is the first thing that gets dropped. Not because anybody decided to drop it. Because when there are six people waiting and the phone is ringing, the ask is the one step with no immediate consequence for skipping. Skip the payment and you notice. Skip the review ask and the day goes fine.

The person who does the asking is the person getting hammered. In most shops the ask lives with whoever hands the customer back their keys, their bag, their card. In a rush, that person is running.

The customer is in a hurry too. In a slow week they linger and chat. In your peak week they are one of six people in line and they want to be gone. The good mood is still there. The three minutes is not.

And the last one is the ugly one. Busy weeks are when the wait gets long, the small mistakes creep in, and the experience is a little worse than the one you are proud of. So the people who do feel moved enough to write something without being asked are more often the annoyed ones. Angry customers are self starting. Happy ones need an invitation.

Put it together and your peak month produces a thin trickle of reviews that skews worse than your real average. Not because you got worse. Because the only people writing were the ones who did not need to be asked.

The part that makes it worse

Your busy season is usually busy because everybody in your category is busy, which means it is also the month the most people are searching for what you do.

So the month with the most eyes on your profile is the month your profile is getting the least new evidence, and what it is getting is the weakest.

That is why this is worth fixing and not just noticing.

This is not the same problem as running a truly seasonal business, where you are only open four months and the rest of the year is dark. This is a year round business with a peak. Different fix, and yours is easier, because you have a quiet stretch to build the system in.

Build it while you are slow

The whole answer is that the ask has to survive being busy, and anything that depends on somebody remembering does not survive being busy.

That means the ask cannot be a reminder. It has to be an object or a trigger. Something on the counter that is part of the transaction, or a message that fires from your software whether anybody thought about it or not.

Set that up in your slow month. Not your busy one. The week before your rush is the last honest chance you have, because once it starts nobody is configuring anything.

Do this

1. 1Sort your existing reviews by month and find your two thinnest months. Check them against your revenue.
2. 2Pick the one thing that will do the asking when nobody has time to. A card at the counter, an automated text, one or the other, not a plan to try harder.
3. 3Set it up during a slow week, and run it on real customers before the rush starts.
4. 4Give the ask to the role that is least slammed at the peak. That is often not the person who handles it now.
5. 5Write the ask down to one sentence anybody can say in four seconds while handing something over.
6. 6Put a number on it. Ten a week during the rush is a target. "More" is not.
7. 7Book the two weeks after the rush as catch up time, on the calendar, now.
8. 8In that window, go back through the peak customers who never got asked and ask them late.
9. 9Check your rating the week after the rush ends, not during. During, it will scare you for no reason.
10. 10Do the same thing again next year, one week earlier.

Asking late still works

The catch up window is the part people skip because it feels like the moment has passed.

It has not. A customer you took care of three weeks ago still remembers, and a message that says you were slammed and are only now getting to say thank you is not a weak ask. It is a human one. People forgive being busy. Everybody has been busy.

What kills a late ask is vagueness. "Hey, would you mind leaving us a review" three weeks later gets nothing, because they have to reconstruct which visit you mean. Name the job. The Tuesday install. The blue Civic. The birthday cake with the wrong spelling that you fixed in an hour. Give them the memory back and the review writes itself.

Where the card fits

This is the exact problem the tap card was built for, and I will say why plainly.

A card sitting on the counter does not get busy. It does not forget, it does not decide there is no time, it does not have six people in line. When the moment is a two second tap instead of a conversation, the ask survives a rush that a spoken ask does not.

That is the whole pitch. Your system for asking already works fine when things are calm. It needs to work on the worst Saturday of the year, and that is a design problem, not an effort problem. The card at shop.optechsol.llc is the version that keeps working when everybody is running.

What it comes down to

Your best month is quietly your worst month, and it has been for years, because the ask is the first thing that falls off the truck when you are slammed.

Fix it while it is quiet. Give the asking to something that cannot get busy. And put the two weeks after the rush on the calendar to catch the people you missed, because they still remember and they will still say yes.