The Best-Rated Telecom Shops Ask Before They Leave the Building

For years I told telecom owners that anything above four stars was fine. Four is a pass, I’d say. Nobody reads past the number.

I was wrong about that, and a woman with a laptop and a shortlist is the reason I know it.

She was moving an office of forty people, she had five providers to choose between, and she sorted the whole list by rating before she read a single word that any of us had written about ourselves.

Two names came off the bottom in about four seconds. Neither of them ever found out they’d been in the running.

I asked her later what her cutoff was, and she said she hadn’t thought of it as a cutoff at all, she’d simply started at the top of the sorted list and stopped once three companies looked competent enough to email.

What I had wrong

A star average isn’t a verdict on your work. I thought it was, and I told clients so for years.

It’s a record of who you asked, and when you asked them.

Telecommunications averages 4.3 stars, which lands at 46 of 47 once I rank the trades, and nearly every trade I audit sits above the people who keep everyone else’s phones and internet working.

Nobody believes that ordering the first time they see it, and I didn’t either. I’ve watched telecom crews perform small miracles at two in the morning in a wiring closet nobody has cleaned since the building went up.

Then I read a few hundred of the reviews, and the ordering started making sense.

It isn’t that nobody reviews you

These businesses carry 104 reviews on average, and 86.8% of them hold at least one.

So people are writing about you. Which people?

The customer whose bill went up without a warning. The one who took a morning off work for an install window and watched nobody arrive. The one whose service dropped in the middle of a sales call, who wrote his review from the parking lot in the tone you’d expect.

Nobody has ever written a review during a week when the internet worked.

Your rating is a nearly complete record of your worst days and almost none of your good ones, unless someone thought to ask.

An average built mostly out of complaints takes months of ordinary, satisfied customers to move, which is exactly why the shops at the top of that ranking started asking long before they needed to.

Having a website doesn’t get you out of it

85.9% of the telecom businesses I sampled have a website, so owning one settles nothing. Your competitor has one too, and hers loads fine.

The number under your name is doing the sorting long before anyone opens either site.

I rebuilt a page in Washington DC last winter for an owner who wanted his rating fixed, and the stars never moved a hair.

Which is why I spend a strange amount of my week talking about reviews with people who hired me to build a website. When there’s a little money on the table I’d rather spend it here than on the three site fixes worth buying, one of which this trade already owns.

1) They ask ten minutes after it starts working

The best-rated shops I audited have all worked out the same thing. There’s one moment when the customer is relieved, and it’s short.

The line comes up. The phones ring. The office manager who has spent three days apologizing to callers finally exhales.

The tech asks right there, before he packs up the ladder. Not a speech, one sentence: “Would you mind putting that in a review? I’ll text you the link before I pull out of the lot.”

Then he sends it from the van, because a promise like that dies somewhere on the drive home.

Everything else about the request, the wording, the follow up, who sends it, matters less than catching that ten minute window.

Ask a week later by email and you’re asking a person who has forgotten your name, which is the natural fate of good work. The phones work now. You’ve become furniture.

When did one of your techs last ask anyone out loud, on site, with the customer standing right there?

2) They ask the person who was standing there

In most companies I look at, the request goes to the wrong human, and it goes there automatically.

Your billing system knows the account contact, so the review request goes to a person in accounts who never met your crew and has no idea whether the job went well or badly.

The one with something to say is whoever watched it happen. The office manager, the receptionist, the site foreman who couldn’t take a card payment for three days.

Get her name onto the ticket, then ask her instead.

3) They answer the angry one for the next reader

Every telecom business collects the outage review. Every single one, and yours is coming whether you deserve it or not.

The instinct is to reply to the reviewer. The best-rated ones aren’t really writing to the reviewer at all.

They’re writing for the woman who reads it three months later with a quote in her hand and two other names to check.

She already assumes that everyone in your industry goes down sometimes, so what she’s really shopping for is the company that tells the truth quickly when it happens.

“We’re sorry you feel that way.”

That sentence has never helped anybody who read it. Say what went down, say how long it took to restore, say what you changed afterwards so it doesn’t happen the same way twice.

A calm, specific reply under a furious review does more for a stranger than your homepage will ever do, because she’s reading it to answer one question: what are these people like when it goes wrong?

4) One person owns the asking

The habit dies the moment it belongs to everybody.

So the best-rated outfits hand it to one name. Every Friday afternoon that person opens the week’s completed jobs and sends three texts, and the system ends there.

Tampa businesses carry the longest lists of reviews I’ve counted anywhere, and every one of them got there by boring repetition rather than by any sort of campaign.

The listing your stars live on takes an afternoon to claim, and whoever answers your phone can do it without a developer, a meeting, or anyone’s permission.

I build telecom websites for a living, and the asking is the one part of the job I can’t do for you. I can put the link in front of people. I can’t stand in the doorway and ask.

Go and look at yours tonight

Open your own listing on your phone tonight and read the newest review out loud, all of it, in your own voice. That part matters more than it sounds like it should.

Then look at the date on it.

If that review is older than the tires on your van, you don’t have a ratings problem. You have an asking problem, and it’s the cheapest thing on this whole list to fix.

So here’s the dare. Three customers whose install went right this month, texted tonight, before you talk yourself out of it.

Then tell me how many of them said no. I’ll bet you a coffee it’s none.