Why your best customers never leave a review
Happy customers are the quietest customers. Here is why great trades businesses end up with barely any Google reviews, and how to fix it.
5 min read
Your best customers are the ones who never say a word.
Think about your last ten jobs. How many of those customers were genuinely pleased with the work?
Most of them, if you are any good.
Now count how many left you a Google review. One? Two? None at all?
There is a reason for that, and it is not your work.
Happy customers are quiet customers
When a job goes exactly as it should, there is no story to tell.
You turned up when you said you would. You did the work properly. You cleaned up and left. The customer got precisely what they expected.
Satisfied people move on with their day. Nothing about a job going well makes somebody open Google and start typing.
Unhappy customers are motivated
The opposite is not true. When somebody is annoyed, they will hunt down your review page without any prompting at all.
That is how genuinely good trades businesses end up with four reviews, one of which is a complaint from years ago.
It is not a reflection of the standard of your work. It is a reflection of who bothers.
The fix is not better work. It is asking.
Most customers are perfectly happy to leave a review. They simply never think of it, and nobody ever asks them to.
The trouble is that asking is exactly the bit that never happens. You finish the job, take payment, and drive to the next one. By the evening you have forgotten who you meant to ask.
It is not laziness. It is that asking depends on you remembering, at the end of a long day, every single time.
Why this costs you more than reputation
Reviews are not just about looking good. They are one of the strongest signals deciding whether you appear in the Google map pack when somebody searches for what you do.
More reviews pushes you higher. Higher gets you seen by more people. More people means more calls.
A business with sixty reviews will out-rank a better tradesman with six, almost every time. That is the game, whether we like it or not. A strong local SEO strategy starts with this.
Take a minute
Count your Google reviews. Then count roughly how many jobs you have completed this year.
The gap between those two numbers is reputation you earned and never collected. Our review system closes that gap by asking every customer automatically once their job is done.
"Satisfied people move on with their day. Nothing about a job going well makes somebody open Google and start typing."
Key takeaways
- Happy customers are quiet. They got what they expected and moved on. Nobody opens Google to say everything went fine.
- Unhappy customers are motivated. They will find your review page without any prompting, which skews your rating against you.
- Most customers are happy to leave a review. They just never think of it, and nobody asks them to.
- Reviews are a ranking signal, not just a vanity metric. More reviews pushes you higher in the map pack. The full Growth System automates the asking so you never miss one. See also the hidden cost of one missed call.
Shaun Chrisp
Founder, Chrisp Design
Shaun has been building websites and growth systems for local trades and service businesses since 2010. Based in Cramlington, Northumberland.