They Want To Review Sarah, Not Your Business

A woman stands in the parking lot with her phone out, typing a first name and the word reviews into the search bar.

She is looking for Sarah. Not for the clinic, not for the shop, not for whatever your business is called on the sign she just walked out from under. Sarah is the person who spent forty minutes on something that took everybody else five, and the woman wants to say so in public, by name, where it counts for Sarah.

Nothing comes up, because there is nothing to come up. So she puts the phone away and the praise never gets written anywhere.

That is the quiet version. The loud version is somebody asking at the counter which page is Sarah's, and whoever is working not knowing what to say.

What that customer is actually trying to do

She is not confused about how the internet works. She is trying to give credit to a person, and she has correctly worked out that a review with your business name at the top does not do that.

This happens in every trade where one person does the whole job in front of the customer, so stylists and hygienists and techs and agents all live with it. The relationship is with a human being and the invoice has a company on it, and the customer notices the gap even if nobody has ever said it out loud to them.

When they cannot find a place to put it, the enthusiasm still goes somewhere, and it is usually somewhere useless to you. Onto her personal social profile, where her friends see it and nobody deciding whether to call you ever will. Or into a text message straight to her, which is lovely and worth nothing to the business. Most often it does not get written at all, because the window on wanting to write something is about ten minutes wide and a dead end closes it.

Meanwhile the review you did get that week is from somebody who had an average visit and a lot of free time.

You cannot solve this by making her a page

The instinct is to give the person what they are asking for. Set Sarah up with her own page, her own reviews, her own thing.

Do not do that. A Google review attaches to a business profile, not to an individual, and the second you start building a separate presence for one employee you have created something you do not control, cannot reply from, and will have an awkward conversation about the day she gives notice. You will also have split your proof across two pages, which is the thing every business that has accidentally ended up with two listings spends a year trying to undo.

The customer's instinct is right. Their proposed solution is not. Your job is to give the crediting somewhere to land on your own page.

Fold the name in, out loud, at the moment

The fix is small and it is verbal. When somebody is clearly about to praise a person, tell them where to put it and tell them to use her name.

Not "could you leave us a review." That is the sentence that produces nine words about professionalism. The one that works is closer to this: "The best thing you could do for Sarah is put that on our Google page with her name in it, because her name in a review is the thing that actually follows her."

That sentence gives them the destination and tells them to use the name, which is what they wanted to do anyway. It also answers the objection they never said out loud, by making the business page the place where crediting Sarah actually works rather than the place where it gets absorbed.

Then let Sarah be the one to say it. A person asking for credit for their own work is not awkward when the customer already wanted to give it. What is awkward is a manager asking on her behalf while she stands there.

Your reply is the other half

When the review lands with her name in it, the reply is where you finish the job.

Say her name back, and say something she does that nobody else there does. "Sarah has a way of slowing a first visit down until it stops being scary, and she will be glad you said so." It reads as true because it is, and it tells the next reader that the name in that review belongs to an actual person on an actual team.

It also settles the thing the customer was worried about. They can see the credit arrived.

One line on the inside of this: show the review to Sarah, the same day, in front of people. The entire reason a customer wanted a page with her name on it is that they assumed the praise would otherwise disappear into the company. Make sure it visibly does not. A team that sees what happens to a named review starts collecting them, and that is a bigger change to your page than anything you will do from the office.

Do this

1. 1Decide now that you are not creating separate review pages for individuals.
2. 2Teach one sentence to the team: put it on our Google page and use my name.
3. 3Have the person who did the work say it, not a manager on their behalf.
4. 4Say the destination out loud. Most people do not know where your page is.
5. 5Reply to every named review using the person's name and one specific thing they do.
6. 6Show named reviews to the person the same day, where other people can see.
7. 7If somebody asks at the counter which page is Sarah's, nobody should have to improvise an answer.
8. 8Keep a short list of who gets named most often. It tells you who is carrying your reputation.

Where the card fits

The whole problem is that the ten minute window closes while somebody is standing in a parking lot searching for a page that does not exist.

A tap card closes the gap at the counter instead. Sarah hands it over, says to use her name, and the review page opens on their phone while she is still standing there. The praise lands on the business profile, with her name in it, from the moment the customer actually wanted to write it. One card per station is how most shops run it, so the person doing the work is the person holding the card. Cards and stands are at shop.optechsol.llc.

The short version

When a customer wants to review a person, they are not confused, they are trying to give credit where it will stick. If your page gives them nowhere to do that, the praise goes to her personal profile, to a text message, or nowhere. Do not build that person their own review page. Teach them to ask for the review on the business page with their own name in it, reply using the name and a real detail, and show the person the review the same day so the team can see that named credit goes somewhere.