The Text Message That Moved an Indianapolis Shop’s Rating

Half past seven on a Tuesday, in a grocery store parking lot on the east side of Indianapolis, a woman is sitting in her car with the engine switched off.

Something started rattling on the drive home and she doesn’t want to take it to work in the morning. Her phone is in her hand and there are two shops on the screen, both open at eight, both about the same distance from her house.

She’s never heard of either one. The only thing telling them apart is a row of stars.

She taps the brighter one. Her kid is asleep in the back and she isn’t going to spend an hour researching a rattle.

The shop she didn’t tap belongs to a man I’ll call Ray.

You’ve been the shop she didn’t tap. So have I, more times than I’d like to count, and neither of us ever got so much as a notification about it.

What he called me about

Ray rang me in February wanting a new website, and he’d already done the diagnosis himself. The phone was quieter than last year, the site was six years old, therefore the site.

I opened it while he was still talking. It loaded quickly, it behaved on a phone, his number sat at the top in big type, and whoever wrote it had somehow written it in his actual voice.

His website was fine. Telling a man that while he’s sitting there with his wallet open is one of the least popular things I do all year.

I ran a long list of clinics last year and the audit went fine right up until I reached the stars.

Then I opened his Google listing, which is the free page Google keeps for a business with its hours, its phone number and its reviews on it, and I stopped talking about websites for the rest of the call.

What was actually on the screen

Ray had hundreds of reviews. Years of them, going back further than the website did.

That part isn’t unusual in this town. The average business I audited in Indianapolis carries 196 reviews, and 89.4% of them hold at least one against 88% across everything I counted.

So getting written about isn’t the problem here. What gets written is.

I’d half expected that before he ever sent me the link, because anyone can pull the city numbers themselves: pick Indianapolis off the city list in the explorer on my report, leave the industry box alone, and every check prints with the number of sites sitting behind it.

So Ray’s stars were nothing special for the town he works in, which averages 4.5 stars and comes out 22 of 24 against the other cities I graded, and that was the part that bothered me most.

Your listing is doing the same job for you tonight, by the way, whether you’ve opened it this year or not. When did you last see it the way a stranger sees it, with your own site nowhere on the screen?

She runs into three things in a fixed order in this city. Two of them she sees, and one she never will.

Reading the bad ones out loud

I asked him to read me his one-star reviews. He didn’t want to, and he did it anyway, which is why he ended up a client instead of a story about a guy who wouldn’t.

Not one of them was about the work. Nobody said the repair failed, nobody said the car came back worse, and two of them said his mechanics were the best in the county.

They were about money. Every single one had a number in it that wasn’t the number he’d quoted.

The shape never varied. The job opened up, the price moved, and the customer heard about it at the counter with her keys already in her hand and nothing left to decide.

Nobody in that building was being dishonest. They were busy, and the conversation about money is the one everybody postpones until it can’t be postponed any longer.

I know your version of it, too. Yours might be the extra day, or the second visit, or the part that had to be ordered in from Ohio.

What would your angry ones be about, if you had to guess before you went and looked?

Would you rather get bad news standing at a counter, or sitting on your own sofa with time to think about it?

What we changed

Two things, and neither of them was on the website.

The estimate now goes out in writing, by text, before anyone touches anything. Not a formal quote on letterhead. A text message with a number in it, sent from the phone that lives on the counter.

Then, the moment that number has to move, a second text goes out and the work stops until she answers.

Ray hated the second one. It means a car up on the lift going nowhere while a woman is stuck in a meeting, and it cost him most of a Thursday the first week.

He hated it for about six weeks. Then he started noticing that people were saying yes faster, because a customer who has already agreed to a number in writing has nothing to argue about when she comes in to collect.

Could your place do both of those tomorrow, without buying anything or waiting on anyone? Mine could, and I’ve still caught myself putting off the second one.

Neither habit gets you more reviews, mind you. Getting more of them is a separate job with its own script and its own awkward pause.

So what actually happened?

Slower than he wanted, which is the honest version.

A rating built out of that many reviews doesn’t lurch anywhere. He checked it every Friday for two months like a man watching a kettle, and I told him to stop, and he didn’t.

The one-star reviews stopped first. You notice that one, because their absence is the thing you’d been quietly dreading every Monday morning.

Then the new ones started reading differently. One of them says they texted him the price before they touched the car, which is a sentence about a text message sitting inside a review about a transmission.

By the fall his rating had moved, and he only spotted it because his daughter mentioned it at dinner.

How long would you keep at something that boring before you decided it wasn’t working? Ray nearly quit in April, and he tells that part himself now, usually to people who are about to quit in April.

He did eventually buy a website from me. The Indianapolis owners I work with tend to get a version of that first phone call, and a few of them never ring back, which is a cost I decided years ago I could live with.

The number you don’t get to write

Your website is what you say about yourself. Your rating is what a few hundred strangers said about you on the days you weren’t in the room.

Which of those two do you suppose the woman in the parking lot believes at half past seven?

Add up all ten of my checks and Indianapolis comes out at 73 out of 100, which is a perfectly respectable place for a city to sit, and none of it helps her tell two auto shops apart on a phone screen.

Las Vegas piles up more reviews than any city I counted, and the websites sitting behind them are another matter.

The rating is slow, and that cuts in both directions. It won’t collapse over one terrible Saturday, and it won’t recover from two years of terrible Saturdays because June went well.

So a low one isn’t a marketing problem and it was never a design problem. It’s a report on how your place has been run, written by the people who were standing in it.

I find that comforting and most owners find it insulting, and I understand why. You can’t buy your way out of it, but you also can’t be outspent by the shop down the road, and there isn’t another number on your whole business that both of those are true of.

Where would you put next year’s money, if you believed me?

If you want an outside read on the website itself, that’s a separate job and I’ll still do it for nothing.

Tomorrow morning

On the first job that goes past the number you quoted, stop everything.

Text her the new number before you do the work, and give her a genuine chance to say no.