🏠 GEM Resource Hub · 📚 Library · 📘 About RocketLevel · 📘 Playbooks · 🗺️ What's Your Market Worth? · 📅 Book a Call
A practical guide for restoration owners, backed by decades of experience in the trade.
When a homeowner is standing in a flooded kitchen at 7 a.m., scared and unsure who to call, they pull out their phone and look you up. They read your reviews before they ever dial. Consumer-survey percentages get quoted constantly here and most of them do not survive a look at the source, so skip the borrowed number and check your own intake notes for how often a caller mentions what they read. Your reviews are the reassurance that you are real and safe to let into the home.
A commercial decision maker reads the same page and takes something else from it. A line like "they were so kind to my family" does little for them. They are scanning for whether anyone mentions crews showing up when they said they would, whether a complaint got answered, and whether the volume of reviews suggests a company big enough to handle their building. Forty warm homeowner reviews and zero from a commercial address tells them you are a residential shop, which is a fair read and not the one you want. Ask your commercial contacts for reviews too, and take the ones that name a building type.
The shops with hundreds of strong reviews built one habit: they ask, every time, on purpose. The owners with a handful of reviews after years in business usually do fine work. They just never made asking part of the job.
Timing and sincerity matter most. The most effective review request is a genuine one from the technician who did the work, made at the close of the job. Ask every customer the same way, whether or not you expect a good one. It does not need a script beyond honesty: an honest Google review about how this went really helps us. Then make it effortless, send a text or email with a direct link to your review page before you leave the driveway. The harder it is to find the page, the fewer reviews you get.
How you respond is watched by everyone who reads later. Thank the people who leave good reviews; it costs nothing and encourages more. Answer the bad ones calmly, professionally, and with an offer to make it right, never defensively. A thoughtful response to a hard review often impresses a future customer more than a wall of five stars, because it shows how you behave when something goes wrong.
It also helps to know what your bad reviews are actually about. Pull your last twenty complaints and sort them into workmanship versus communication. In the shops we work with, the pile usually lands hard on the communication side: unreturned calls, a missed window, and the mitigation-to-reconstruction handoff where the customer felt dropped. Do that sort before you assume yours are different. Plenty of those complaints could have been prevented with a phone call.
Keep an eye on the platforms your customers actually use, set an alert so you know when a new review lands, and address issues quickly. And earn them the real way: never buy or fake reviews. It violates the platforms' rules, it is easy to spot, and it wrecks the trust you are trying to build. Invite everyone, for the reasons the script below spells out, and earn the rating you get.
An ad stops working the day you stop paying. Reviews stay on the page, and every job done well and asked for adds one more.
<aside> ✅
Do this: Build the ask into the job-close. Train techs to ask every customer for an honest Google review and text them the link before they pull out of the driveway, and commit to responding to every review within a few days.
</aside>