If you’re in a home service business you know that getting reviews is one of the hardest customer interactions, ranking up there with getting a budget number.
With our most recent test, we asked 32 customers and got 11 reviews in 1 month. That’s a 34% review rate!
Here’s how we did it.
We do all of our scheduling through Housecall Pro. Housecall Pro has a lot of cool and useful features, including their automatic email reminders which we used to get a 20% review rate from customers.
That’s fantastic, and I had other Housecall Pro users contact me and ask for the copy I used in that email (you can get it here).
But we knew we could do better. And we did. Last month we tried something that beat the review email… and I can’t take any credit for it.
Housecall recently added the ability to edit and customize the text message notifications that get sent to our customers, both before and after a job.
When I mentioned this new feature to Eric, the operations manager, he got that look in his eye. He had an idea.
Eric edited the text message that gets sent when a job is completed. Now, when our tech leaves a job, the customer gets this message:
This text update alone boosted us from 74 reviews to 85 in a month!
Here’s why this method is so effective:
- It’s personal. It looks like it comes from their service tech, asking for a personal favor.
- It’s automatic. We don’t need to remember to ask every time – this message went out to 32 customers without a second thought from anyone on our team.
- It’s easy. The short link in the message sends customers straight to the Google review page. Just a few clicks and it’s done. Most of the reviews happen within an hour of job completion.
We shared this tip with Nate Brott, who also uses Housecall Pro, and he tried it out. I got a message from him a few days later:
Trying out the text message review link? Let me know how it works for you!