Heating Companies Ask for the Review Before They Leave

Last Wednesday I put the kettle on and started opening Google listings for heating and cooling companies, one city at a time.

2,429 of them went into my sample across 24 markets, and 1,839 had a website I could open and grade.

I do the listings before the websites. Always, and not for any clever reason.

A homeowner with no heat starts there too, and I want to see what she sees before I get precious about anyone’s homepage.

Two days, most of a notebook, and one number I ended up checking by hand.

The number I checked by hand

98.3% of these businesses hold at least one Google review.

For scale, 88% of everything I sample can say the same.

So I went hunting for the habit underneath it, which is what I do whenever a trade finishes first of the 47 I check, and I expected to find software your competitors had all bought.

There isn’t any. No magic tool here that a hair salon couldn’t buy on the same Tuesday, for the same money, from the same company.

What I found was six small habits. Four of them happen before the van pulls off the driveway.

1) The ask happens in the hallway

She has heat again.

The house is climbing back toward something livable, your technician is winding up a cord, and she’s standing there feeling about as warm toward a contractor as she’s ever going to feel.

The heating companies at the top spend that minute. Not tomorrow, and not in an email on your customer’s Friday afternoon.

Nothing about that is a heating trick. The best-rated telecom shops ask before they’ve carried the ladder back to the van, for the same reason.

Ask a homeowner on Friday how she feels about her furnace. Go on, try it.

When did anyone at your company last ask for a review while standing in a customer’s hallway with the blower still running?

By then the heat is just the heat. It’s the way the house is supposed to be, and nobody writes four paragraphs about a house behaving normally.

2) The technician asks, not the office

I’ve sat in the meeting where an owner decides this one, and the instinct is always the same. Give it to the office, because the office is polite and the office has the email addresses.

The office loses. Every single time.

She doesn’t know the office. She knows the man who found the cracked heat exchanger and explained it to her without making her feel stupid.

So the ask comes from him, out loud, in one sentence he says the same way at every house. It sounds like a person rather than a policy, because it is one.

Stuck on the wording? I’ve written down the sentence I use when I ask a customer for a review, and the moment I say it.

Does yours have a sentence? Or does he decide, house by house, whether this particular customer seems like the type who would bother?

The owners who leave that decision with the technician are the ones I find with a listing full of gaps, because a tired man at four in the afternoon will always decide that this house probably isn’t the one.

3) They ask after the bad jobs too

The ones near the top ask when the week went badly as well.

The part that took four days to show up. The second visit. The Saturday callout nobody on your crew wanted.

Reckless, right?

It isn’t, and I’ve watched it play out often enough to trust it now. A customer who was annoyed on Tuesday and looked after by Thursday writes a longer, warmer, far more specific review than one who was mildly pleased the whole way through.

She has a story with a middle in it, and those are the reviews the next homeowner actually stops to read.

How many of yours came out of a week that went wrong?

Companies that only ask when everything went perfectly end up with eleven reviews and a profile that looks abandoned. Your worst week of the winter is your best week for asking.

4) Nobody makes her go and find the page

The link is on a card in the van, on the invoice, and in the text the office sends when the job closes out.

Your Google Business Profile is the panel carrying your name, your hours and your stars, and the part she opens is the review tab underneath it. Two taps of her thumb. No searching, no hunting for the right button.

Could your customer get there in two taps tonight, from a text you’ve already sent her? Test it on your own phone before you answer that.

I’ve watched owners spend a year and a serious budget on a website while that card still didn’t exist, which is a bit like installing a beautiful furnace and leaving the thermostat in the garage.

5) They keep the listing itself current

Hours that change in November get changed in November. Your service area matches the towns your trucks actually reach. The photographs are of equipment you installed, not of a stock family hugging a radiator.

When was yours last edited?

None of that wins an award, and all of it takes an afternoon a year.

6) Someone answers every one

Including the five star ones. Especially those.

Two lines, her first name, the thing that had gone wrong with the system. Ten minutes for an office manager on a Monday morning.

The next homeowner isn’t really reading your replies. She’s checking whether anyone’s home.

A reply that names the equipment and the neighborhood does something a star rating can never manage on its own, because it shows a stranger that an actual company is standing behind the number rather than a review widget nobody has looked at since installation.

What all six have in common

Not one of them is a website. Not one of them costs you money. Not one needs a designer, a developer, or me.

They’re the kind of habit an owner establishes once, by writing down a sentence and handing it to a crew, after which the whole arrangement runs by itself for a decade without anyone paying it much attention.

The average heating and cooling business carries 383 reviews at 4.8 stars. Built one hallway at a time, by people who were tired and asked anyway.

Which is why the companies losing work despite a wall of stars bother me more than any other kind of client I take on. The hard part is finished. The hard part was always the asking.

An owner in your trade wrote to me about that exact gap, a good audit score on paper and a phone that stayed quiet, and I couldn’t argue with a word of it.

Where all those stars are pointing

Every review you have is a signpost, and every signpost points at your website.

Last year I opened the homepage a cleaning company’s stars were sending people to and ended up rebuilding the thing.

This trade doesn’t fumble that as badly as most. 36.9% of these homepages carry a contact form, where 28% do across everything I audit, so the instinct to make things easy for her does survive the trip onto the website.

What I keep meeting on calls is a company with hundreds of reviews and no idea whatsoever what happens in the ninety seconds after she taps through to the website they point at.

She arrives already sold. She’s read six of your replies and she liked the one about the condensate line.

All the page has to do is not lose her. Most of the heating and cooling sites I build start from a listing that was already better than the website it pointed at, which is a strange and lucky place to start from.

Do you know what yours does with her? Send me the address and I’ll run the checks I ran last Wednesday, listing first, in her order rather than mine.

If it were my business, I’d spend this morning writing the sentence my technicians say in the hallway, and I’d have it in every van by Monday.