A Year Of Asking And The Guy Down The Street Still Has More

A guy at the counter mentions, on his way out and meaning it kindly, that his wife found both shops and the other one had way more reviews, but he liked the website better.

It is a compliment, mostly. He is standing in the shop because of a website. The part underneath it is that you were the second choice on the only page that matters, and this is not the first time somebody has said a version of it to your face.

You have been asking for reviews for a year. The signs, the email follow up, the line on the invoice. He has been in business four years to your eleven, has nothing on his counter, has never sent a follow up in his life, and has twice your reviews.

Start from the part worth saying plainly: he is almost certainly not cheating. Bought reviews are a real thing and they are not the common answer. The common answer is mechanical and about four items long.

Count the one number nobody counts

Before diagnosing anything, work out how many customers each of you actually serves.

Reviews track transactions, not quality. A shop doing forty small jobs a week has forty chances a week. A shop doing six large ones has six. If you do careful, expensive, infrequent work and he does fast, cheap, constant work, he can be worse at asking than you are and still bury you, because he has eight times the tickets in the drum.

So stop comparing totals and compare rate. Take your last hundred invoices and count how many reviews came out of them. Do the same for him as best you can from the dates on his page. Reviews per hundred customers is the only version of this comparison that tells you anything, and plenty of owners who run it find they are not behind on asking at all. They are behind on volume, which is a different business problem and not a reputation one.

If your rate is genuinely lower, now there is something to fix. The rest of this is the list, in the order it is usually true.

It happens in the room or it does not happen

The first and biggest one: he asks while the customer is standing in front of him, and you ask afterward.

Afterward is a different person. The one in the room just got their problem solved and feels something about it. The one who gets your email two days later is at work, scrolling past it, feeling nothing in particular about a thing that is no longer on their mind. Same customer, different human being. No amount of follow up polish closes that gap, because the gap is the feeling and not the message.

A counter ask with nothing automated behind it beats a well built sequence that fires on Thursday. That is the whole thing, and it is why somebody with no system wins.

Your system runs one day in five

Second one, and it is the one most owners cannot see from the office. The asking is not actually happening.

You put it in place, you reminded everybody for a few weeks, and now one person does it. Usually the same one. Which means the review habit runs on the days that person works the counter and quietly does not run the rest of the week. On paper there is a system. In practice there is a volunteer.

There is a cheap way to find out. Look at the dates on your last thirty reviews and see whether they cluster on particular days of the week. If they do, you now know exactly who your system is.

You are gating and you would never call it that

Third one, and this is the one that stings.

You ask the customers you feel good about. The job that went smoothly, the person who said thank you twice. You skip the one who was short with you and the one whose install ran long, and you skip anybody you are simply not sure about. Nobody decided to do this. Asking just feels fine when you already know the answer and feels like inviting trouble when you do not.

The guy down the street asks everyone, because he has not thought about it hard enough to be selective. So he gets the four stars you avoided, and the three star with a fair paragraph in it, and he also gets the ones you had written off who turn out to have been perfectly happy and merely quiet.

You filtered your own page down to the cleanest third of your customers, and then wondered why the page is thin.

The ask has steps in it

Fourth one. Count the moves between somebody agreeing and somebody typing.

If the answer is open an app, search the business name, pick the right listing out of three, find the button, sign in, then write, you will lose most of the people who genuinely meant to do it. Every step is a place to stop. The business that wins this is often the one that accidentally removed four steps by handing somebody a phone that was already on the right page.

And last, the unglamorous one. He has been doing the same small thing every day for four years without stopping, while you started, drifted, restarted in the spring, and drifted again. Review pages get built by boredom. Consistency beats effort here, every time.

What catching up actually looks like

It is not a push. A sudden wall of reviews in one week reads strange to a careful reader, and the habit does not survive a push anyway.

It is picking the one failure above that is actually yours and changing one thing about the moment of handoff. Then doing it for a quarter. The arithmetic is dull and it works. A handful more per month, every month, and in a year the page tells a story about a business that has been busy recently, which is what a reader is actually checking for when they glance at a count.

Do this

1. 1Count reviews per hundred customers for both of you before concluding anything.
2. 2If your volume is lower, treat this as a sales problem and stop blaming the asking.
3. 3Move the ask into the room, at handoff, out loud, by the person who did the work.
4. 4Check the days of the week on your last thirty reviews to find out who your system really is.
5. 5Ask every customer, including the ones you are not sure about.
6. 6Count the steps between yes and typing, and remove at least two.
7. 7Pick one change and run it for a full quarter before judging it.
8. 8Do not buy anything, and do not run a one week push.

Where the card fits

Three of the reasons above are really the same reason. The ask is too far from the moment and has too many steps in it.

A tap card collapses both. It sits at the counter so the ask happens in the room, and it opens the review page on the customer's phone with nothing to search for and nothing to pick out of a list. That is most of the gap between you and somebody who has no system at all, closed by an object that does not need reminding. Cards and stands are at shop.optechsol.llc.

The short version

A competitor with no system and more reviews is almost never cheating. Count reviews per hundred customers first, because high volume businesses win on totals without being better at asking. If your rate is genuinely lower it is one of four things: you ask after the moment instead of in it, the system is really one employee, you quietly only ask the customers you feel sure about, or the ask has six steps in it. Fix one, run it for a quarter, and let the page build out of boredom rather than a push.