They Called Because Of A Review And You Have No Idea Which One

"I read your reviews. That's why I called."

Good call, nice person, job booked for Thursday. You said thanks and moved on to the address.

Somewhere on that page is the paragraph that made a stranger pick up the phone. You have forty of them. You do not know which one it was, and you are about to go collect more without knowing.

You know reviews work. That is not the same as knowing what works.

Most owners get to the point where reviews are clearly doing something. The calls say so. The pattern is obvious enough that nobody argues about whether it is worth asking for them.

Then the effort stops there, because the scoreboard only shows two things. How many, and what the average is. Both of those are counts. Neither one tells you what a reader actually responded to.

So the asking continues blind. More reviews is the only lever anybody can see, and more is genuinely better, but it is a strange way to run the one piece of marketing that is already working. You would not run ads for two years without knowing which ad brings people in.

The difference here is that the answer is free and sitting on the other end of a phone call you are already having.

Ask the one question on the first call

Not a survey. Not an email afterwards that nobody opens. One line, in the conversation where they just told you reviews were the reason.

"Out of curiosity, was there anything in there that stuck with you?"

That is the whole thing. It sounds like interest rather than research, because it is.

What comes back is usually specific and usually surprising. People do not say they liked the 4.8. They say there was one about a guy whose furnace went out on a Sunday. Or the one where somebody mentioned you walked them through the quote line by line. Or they will tell you a name, because an employee got mentioned and that made the business feel like people instead of a logo.

Write the answer down. Same place every time, one line per call. A month of that and you are not guessing anymore.

What the answers almost always have in common

The reviews that do the selling tend to be the ones where the reviewer described a situation rather than a feeling.

A five star saying great service is pleasant and it does nothing. The reader cannot see themselves in it. A five star that opens with the water heater failing the night before a family visit gives a stranger something to match against their own Tuesday, and the stranger who is in that exact spot right now is the one who calls.

That is why this matters more than it sounds. If the reviews doing the work are the ones with a story in them, then the goal of your asking changes. You are not trying to get more lines. You are trying to get more of the kind of line that already proved it works on your page specifically, with your customers, in your trade.

And you cannot know which kind that is for your business until you ask the people it worked on.

Then ask for that, on purpose

Once you know which reviews are pulling, the ask changes by one sentence.

Most owners ask for a review and leave it at that, which gets them whatever the customer thinks a review is supposed to sound like, which is usually a compliment with no detail.

Give them a starting point instead. "If you do write one, the thing that helps people the most is what was going on when you called us."

That is not scripting them and it is not telling them what to say about the work. It points at the part of the story they would have skipped, because the customer assumes the interesting part is you and the useful part is actually them.

You will get longer reviews. More importantly, you will get the shape of review that you now have evidence works, instead of the shape people default to.

Watch out for one thing

The answers will skew toward whatever is newest and highest on the page, because that is what most readers actually get through.

So treat it as a steer and not as a verdict. If three people in a row mention the same review, that review is doing real work. If one person mentions something, you have learned one thing from one person.

And an older review that keeps coming up is telling you something important, which is that it has survived being pushed down the page and people are still reading far enough to find it. That is the strongest signal on the board.

Do this

1. 1Add one question to the call when somebody mentions your reviews: was there anything in there that stuck with you.
2. 2Write the answer down in one line, in the same place every time.
3. 3After a month, look for the reviews that came up more than once.
4. 4Read those out loud and find what they have in common, which is usually a situation rather than a compliment.
5. 5Change your ask by one sentence, pointing people at what was going on when they called you.
6. 6Keep an eye on whether an older review keeps surfacing, because that one is working hard.
7. 7Tell whoever answers your phone to ask the same question, so you are not the only one collecting it.
8. 8Revisit it a couple of times a year, because the jobs you want more of will change and the proof has to change with them.

Where the card fits

Knowing which review sells is only useful if you can go get more like it.

That is the part that stalls. The customer whose story would land hardest is the one you helped on the worst day of their month, and that person is grateful and busy and not going to go searching for your business name three days later to write it out. The window where they would have done it is the window where you are still standing in front of them.

A tap card is how you use that window. Phone touches the card while the furnace is running again and the relief is still fresh, the review page opens, and you get the review that sounds like the one three different callers have now told you they read.

Cards and stands are at shop.optechsol.llc.

The short version

Customers keep telling you reviews are why they called, and that information is going straight into the bin. Ask one question on the call, write the answer down, and after a month you will know which reviews are actually doing the work. They will almost always be the ones describing a situation instead of paying a compliment. Then change your ask by one sentence so you collect more of that shape on purpose, and stop treating the count as the only thing you can steer.