A Five Star Told Everybody You Do That Part For Free

The sentence sits in the middle of a five star, right after the part about being on time.

"And he didn't even charge us for the extra outlet."

Every word of that is true. It was a thirty dollar part and twenty minutes, the customer had been patient about a reschedule, and it felt like the right thing to do standing in that kitchen on a Thursday. Nobody wrote it down anywhere. It was a judgement call on one job.

It is now the fourth line of the review a stranger reads before calling you.

A favor became a published price

The problem here is not that the review is wrong. That is the whole difficulty with it. There is nothing to flag, nothing to dispute, and nobody did anything but say something nice about you in public.

But a review is not read the way it was written. The customer was describing a moment. The reader treats it as information about what your company does, because that is what they came to the page for. They are not thinking about your margins or about what kind of day you were having.

So a one off got filed as a feature, and it is now sitting next to your phone number where everybody who is deciding whether to call you will see it.

This is different from an old review that stopped being accurate because something at your shop changed. Nothing changed here. You still do not include that outlet, you never did, and the review is a faithful account of a day you were generous.

Where it actually costs you

It costs you at the quote.

Somebody calls, books, gets your number, and there is a small flat spot in the conversation. They were not expecting that line item. They do not say why, because most people will not quote a review back at you, but they read something that made the work sound a little more included than the number in front of them.

Sometimes they say it out loud. More often they just feel a gap between the business on the page and the business on the phone, and that gap is the thing that turns an ordinary job into a three star about the pricing being unclear.

The cost is small on any one job. It compounds quietly, because the review stays up and keeps working on everybody who reads it.

Two things it could be, and you have to pick one

Before touching anything, decide which of these is true. The rest follows from it.

The first possibility is that it is actually a good idea. Some owners read that review and realize the thing they threw in costs them very little and closes more jobs than it loses. If that is the case, stop treating it as a leak and write it into the quote as something you include. The review stops being a liability the moment it becomes accurate going forward.

The second possibility is that it was generosity on a specific day for a specific reason, and it does not scale. A roof is not a thirty dollar outlet. If that is the case, the fix is in how you quote, not in the review.

Most of the time it is the second one. Owners are usually right about what they can afford to give away.

Do not go near the review

The instinct is to clear it up. Reply underneath and explain that the extra outlet is normally a charge and this was a courtesy.

Do not do that.

You would be correcting somebody in public for complimenting you, in front of an audience of people deciding whether you are pleasant to deal with. The reader does not come away thinking you are precise about pricing. They come away thinking you are the kind of business that argues on its own review page.

Asking the customer to edit it is worse. They did you a favor twice, once with the outlet being a nice memory and once with the review, and now you are asking them to take part of it back.

Leave the review completely alone. Thank them if you reply at all, and say nothing about the outlet.

Fix it at the quote, out loud

The place to handle this is the conversation where the number comes up, and the move is to name it before they have to.

Something like this does it. "You might have seen a review mentioning we threw in an extra outlet on a job. That was a call we made that day. What is in this price is everything on the list here, and if you want the extra run I can price it for you now."

It takes nine seconds and it does three things at once. It tells them you read your own reviews, it tells them the number in front of them is the real one, and it makes the generosity sound like what it was, which is a decision a person made rather than a policy somebody forgot to honor.

Nobody has ever been annoyed by that sentence. The thing people react badly to is finding out later.

The quiet fix is volume

One generous review is loud when your page has eleven reviews. It is a normal piece of texture when the page has ninety.

That is worth sitting with, because it is the only fix here that works without a conversation. A single review carries real weight on a thin page, and whatever it happens to say becomes a big share of what strangers know about you. The way to stop any one review from setting your prices is to be collecting steadily enough that no single one is carrying that much.

The business that gets surprised by this is almost always the business that only gets reviewed when something notable happens, good or bad. Steady, ordinary reviews from ordinary jobs are what keep the page describing the business instead of describing its best day.

Do this

1. 1Find the review and read the sentence exactly as a stranger would, not as the person who was there.
2. 2Decide whether the thing is worth including for everybody from now on, or whether it was a one off.
3. 3If it is worth including, put it in the quote and let the review be accurate.
4. 4If it was a one off, change nothing about the review and nothing about your pricing.
5. 5Do not reply with a correction and do not ask the customer to edit anything.
6. 6Add one line to your quoting conversation that names it before the customer does.
7. 7Tell whoever else quotes for you to use the same line, so you are not the only one who knows.
8. 8Start collecting reviews on ordinary jobs so one memorable day stops being a quarter of your page.

Where the card fits

The review that caused this came from a customer who felt strongly enough to go find your page and type. That is the only kind of review a business gets when nobody is asking.

That is why the page ends up made of outliers. The great day, the bad day, the free outlet. The forty people in between who got exactly what they paid for and were perfectly happy about it never got around to it, and those are the reviews that would describe your business accurately.

A tap card is how those people end up on the page. Phone touches the card while you are still standing there, the review page opens, and you get the ordinary five star from the job where nothing remarkable happened.

Enough of those and no single sentence is setting your prices. Cards and stands are at shop.optechsol.llc.

The short version

A kindness on one job got published as a price, and the reader has no way to know it was a one off. Do not correct the review and do not ask the customer to change it. Decide whether the thing is worth including for everybody, and if it is not, handle it at the quote with one sentence that names it before the customer has to. Then collect enough ordinary reviews that no single generous day is doing that much talking for you.