Half Your Review Requests Never Arrived And Nobody Noticed

You asked how many review requests went out last month and somebody said about ninety.

Ninety sounds healthy. It is the number the system reports, it is the number that goes on the whiteboard, and nobody asked the second question, which is how many of them arrived.

That number lives somewhere else, if anybody is looking at it at all. It is usually a lot smaller than ninety.

Sent is not delivered

Every messaging system you own will happily tell you it sent something. That is a different claim than the message reaching a human being, and the gap between the two is where this whole problem lives.

A queued text reports as accepted. An email handed off to a mail server reports as sent. Both of those can bounce five seconds later, and unless somebody set up a place for that news to land, it goes nowhere. Your dashboard keeps its clean number and you keep wondering why the reviews are not showing up.

Where they actually die

Go through the list and you will recognize most of these from your own counter.

Plenty of them are landlines sitting in the field where a mobile number goes, which happens constantly with older customers who gave you the number they actually use. Others have a digit transposed by whoever was on the phone during a rush. You will find work emails for people who left that company a year ago, and gmail addresses spelled gmial. Some numbers were fine when you took them and got disconnected when the customer changed carriers. And a few customers gave you a fake number on purpose because they did not want to be called, which did not stop them from ending up in your review list.

Then there is the carrier problem, which is not a data problem at all. A text with a link in it, sent from a number the customer does not recognize, gets treated like the thousand other texts with links in them that arrive every week. Sometimes it never gets delivered. Often it gets delivered and ignored, which looks identical to you from the outside.

Nobody watches the bounce because nobody was told to

This is not negligence. It is that bounce notices are aimed at a mailbox nobody opens.

Delivery failures go to whatever address was configured when the system was set up, which is often an owner's old email, or a noreply box, or a folder rule somebody made to stop the noise. Your texting system probably has a failed status on the record and no alert attached to it. The information exists and nothing in the business is pointed at it.

So go find it yourself. Open your texting tool and your email tool and look for the delivery or failure report for the last ninety days. Count them.

Read the shape, not just the number

Once you have the failures in front of you, look at how they group before you fix anything.

If the failures are spread evenly across everybody, you have a list that has aged badly and a cleanup job. If they cluster around one staff member, one shift, or one intake form, you have a data entry problem and cleaning the list will not help, because the same bad records will be back in six weeks.

That second case is the common one, and it is good news. It is a fifteen minute conversation instead of a project.

Fix intake first

Cleaning a dirty list before you fix how it gets dirty means cleaning it again next quarter.

Read the number back. Out loud, at the counter or on the phone, every time. "Let me read that back to you, 650 555 0148, is that the one that texts?" It takes four seconds and it catches the transposed digit while the customer is still standing there.

Ask for the mobile specifically, not just a phone number. Ask whether email or text is better and put it in the right field. Stop letting anybody enter a placeholder to get past a required field, because a placeholder is a permanent dead record that looks like a real one forever.

Then name your business in the first three words of the text, before any link, so the message does not read like every other unknown link somebody gets. A request that starts with your shop's name is a request the customer can decide about.

Then go clean what you have

Now the list is worth cleaning, and mostly you just remove things.

Delete the confirmed dead records rather than leaving them to pad your sent number. For the ones you are unsure about, your next real interaction is the fix, and there is no point guessing from a spreadsheet. Do not buy a bulk cleaning service as the first move, because it will hand you a tidier version of a list your intake is still breaking.

Do this

1. 1Find the delivery or failure report in your texting tool and your email tool for the last ninety days.
2. 2Count how many requests actually reached somebody, and put that number on the whiteboard instead of the sent number.
3. 3Point failure notices at a mailbox a human opens, and set an alert if your system can.
4. 4Check whether the failures cluster on one person, one shift, or one form.
5. 5Start reading every phone number back to the customer, out loud, every time.
6. 6Ask for mobile specifically and record whether they prefer text or email.
7. 7Ban placeholder entries in required fields.
8. 8Put your business name in the first three words of the request, ahead of the link.
9. 9Delete confirmed dead records so they stop inflating your numbers.

Where the card fits

Every failure in this post comes from the same source, which is that the ask has to travel to find the customer.

A tap card does not travel. It does not need a phone number, an email address, a correct spelling, or a carrier willing to deliver a link from a stranger. The customer is already in front of you, they tap their own phone against the card, and the review page opens. There is nothing in that path that can bounce. That is worth having as your main ask and keeping the texts as the backup, rather than the other way around. The cards are at shop.optechsol.llc.

The short version

Your system reports what it sent, not what arrived, and the difference is sitting in a failure report nobody opens. Go count the failures, see whether they cluster on one person or one form, and fix intake before you clean the list. Read numbers back out loud, name your business ahead of the link, and lean on an in person ask that has nothing to deliver in the first place.