Your Old Employee Is Using Your Reviews As Their Resume

A customer sent the owner a screenshot and asked if he had seen it yet. It was the new shop's page, a mile and a half down the road, and the top post was a photo of a five star review with a name highlighted in yellow. The caption said something about four years of happy customers.

The review was real. The name in it was real. The page it had been screenshotted from was the owner's own profile.

That tech had been there four years. People asked for him by name, and a good number of them put the name in writing, which at the time felt like the system working. Now there were maybe thirty reviews on the owner's profile that read like a portfolio for a business that opened six weeks ago.

The reviews are honest, and that is the whole problem

Nobody is cheating here. The customer wrote what happened, the person who did the work was good at it, and they said so by name. Every one of those reviews is a true account of a real visit to your business.

That is also why there is no clean move. Fake reviews have a path and policy violations have a form, but a real customer describing a real visit is just a review, and it is going to sit there even though the person in it left.

What has changed is who it is working for. A stranger reading your page now gets a run of sentences about a person they can find somewhere else, and the other shop is happy to help them find it.

Stop filing reports, because you will lose a month

The instinct is to try to get them taken down, and that instinct will cost you four weeks.

Removal exists for content that breaks the platform's rules. Spam, conflict of interest, content that is not about the business, abuse. Read the policy yourself rather than taking anybody's word for it, including mine, because it moves. What you will find is that a real customer describing a real visit is not in there, and the fact that the employee left afterward is not a category.

So the reviews stay. Which means the useful question is not how to remove thirty reviews. It is what the next hundred say.

The screenshots are a separate question

Taking a public review and reposting it is something anybody can do, and mostly it is not worth your afternoon.

It gets different if the new shop is presenting your reviews as reviews of their business. Somebody saying I did this work is one thing. Posting your review page under a line about our happy customers, with your business name cropped out of the picture, is a claim about who earned what. If that is happening at any scale it is a conversation with an attorney rather than something you handle in a reply box. Screenshot it, date it, keep it in a folder, and talk to somebody who does this for a living before you decide it is nothing.

What you do not do is answer it in public. There is no version of a comment war with a former employee that reads well to a customer.

The faster moving problem is your customer list

While you are thinking about the page, people are being called.

Somebody who worked for you for four years knows which customers asked for him, what they drive or who lives in the house, and roughly when they are due. He does not need your list. He remembers most of it.

So that is the week's actual work, and it has very little to do with reviews. Call your regulars before they hear it from the other direction. You are not warning them about anybody. You are telling them who is looking after them now and who to ask for, and you are doing it in your own voice instead of letting a surprise do it.

Change what the next reviews credit

The reason thirty reviews read like somebody's resume is that the asking was built around a person, probably without anyone deciding that on purpose. You can rebuild it around the work.

The ask has to name the business and the outcome rather than the individual. There is a difference between "mention Reuben if he looked after you" and "tell people what we got done for you," and the difference shows up a hundred reviews later when one of your people leaves.

Hand offs matter more than the wording. When somebody new takes over an account, introduce them in front of the customer, with the old person's blessing if you still have it. Customers will follow somebody they have met and shaken hands with. They do not follow a name printed on an invoice.

And reply as the business. Thank your current crew by name in the replies, so a reader scrolling the recent ones sees a shop with people in it rather than a shop that used to have one guy.

Do this

1. 1Read your profile from the top as a stranger would and count how many of the first ten reviews name the person who left.
2. 2Leave those reviews alone. Do not report them and do not reply to any of them about the departure.
3. 3Call every regular that person worked with this week, before the other shop does.
4. 4Save and date any post where your reviews are being presented as somebody else's, then ask an attorney whether it matters.
5. 5Rewrite your review ask so it points at the business and the result, not at an individual.
6. 6Introduce the person taking over an account to the customer's face, in front of the old relationship if you can.
7. 7Reply to your last ten reviews naming whoever is doing that work now.
8. 8Ask hard for ninety days, because the top of your page is recent reviews and recent is the part you can still change.

Where the card fits

Every one of those thirty reviews was earned at a moment somebody was standing in your shop, in your van, or in their own kitchen with your crew packing up. That moment is still happening every day, and it is the only place the next hundred reviews come from.

A tap card puts the ask in whoever is doing the work today, wearing your shirt, on your counter. It is a small change and it moves the credit from one individual back to the business. Cards and stands are at shop.optechsol.llc.

The short version

Honest reviews that name a person who left are not coming down, and trying is a wasted month. The screenshots only matter if your reviews are being sold as theirs, and that is a lawyer question rather than a reply. The urgent part is your customer list, because he remembers it. Then rebuild the ask around the business and the outcome, reply with your current crew's names in it, and spend ninety days filling the top of the page with reviews about who works there now.