Most plumbers do excellent work and get almost no reviews for it. The national average for a plumbing business is 11 Google reviews. That number is not low because customers are unhappy. It is low because nobody asked them at the right moment.
This guide covers exactly why reviews don't come in automatically, when to ask, how to ask, and how to build a system that gets you reviews without any extra effort after setup.
The research on this is consistent. Customers who had a positive experience are seven times less likely to leave a review than customers who had a negative one. Negative emotion drives action. Satisfaction does not.
Add to this the friction of finding your Google profile, clicking through to reviews, thinking of something to write, and most happy customers simply move on with their day. They meant to leave a review. They just never did.
Most plumbers who do ask for reviews ask at the wrong time. Either at the end of the job in person (awkward, customer is distracted) or never (too busy to follow up).
The window that works is 2-4 hours after the job is complete. The customer is back to their day, the problem is solved, the relief is fresh. A personal text message at that moment gets a response rate of 25-35% in most industries.
A text sent 3 days later gets roughly half of that.
Generic requests get ignored. Personal ones get responses. The difference between these two texts is significant:
Generic: “Hi, we'd appreciate a Google review if you have a moment.”
Personal: “Hi Sarah, thanks for letting us fix the burst pipe this morning. If you have 60 seconds, a quick review really helps our small business. Here's the link.”
The personal version names the customer, references the specific job, and gives a time commitment. Response rates on messages like this run 30-40% for plumbing businesses.
Manually texting every customer after every job is unsustainable beyond roughly 5 jobs a week. At 10-15 jobs a week it becomes a part-time job in itself.
A review automation system connects to your job management software (Jobber, QuickBooks, or similar) and sends the personalised invite automatically when a job closes. You do the work, the system handles the ask.
The best systems also send a gentle follow-up on Day 4 and Day 10 if the customer hasn't reviewed yet. This follow-up sequence roughly doubles the number of reviews you collect from each campaign.
If you have been in business for 2-5 years without a review system, you have hundreds of satisfied customers who never left a review. That is not a lost cause.
A reactivation campaign, sending personalised review requests to your past customer list, typically generates 30-80 reviews from a single send. It is the fastest way to build a review profile from scratch.
There is no trick to getting more reviews. The formula is straightforward: do good work, ask the right customer at the right time with a personal message, and have a system that does it automatically so it actually happens.
Most plumbers already do the first part. The second and third parts are where reviews get left on the table.
Want a system that does this automatically?
ServiceScore connects to your CRM, sends personalised invites after every job, and runs reactivation campaigns to collect reviews from past customers.
Start collecting verified reviews free