You could sever a service customer relationship with one email if you ask for a review in a offensive way. If you ask correctly though, you can multiply your customers and have multitudes of positive reviews to show-off.

Here are a couple tips for asking your pool service customers for online reviews.

• Ask for feedback first. Soften the request by first asking the customer for general feedback. This way, it’s less intimidating to the customer, and you can field whether or not the service customer is satisfied with your services. If they seem to be happy with you, go ahead and ask them to leave you a formal online review (and include the link to make it easy!).
• Ask when the customer is happy. An upset customer won’t be willing to give a glowing review. Make sure you’re asking at a good time.
• Ask the customer right after a service is completed. Usually, the best time to ask is right after you’ve serviced their pool. Basically, you want to “strike while the iron is hot.” When you ask right after a service is rendered, you’re catching the customer at the moment they are most excited about your company.

Asking for reviews can be tough. Sometimes, you just don’t have the words. If that is the case you can try these email templates for asking for reviews.

As we’ve discussed, getting online reviews can be great for business, but you should never cut corners in collecting them. There are wrong ways to ask for reviews that can upset the customers or the review platforms that can end up getting you kicked off of them.

Trying one of the below tactics will not end well for you.

• Don’t buy reviews. Review platforms are constantly updating their spam filters. And even when fake reviews do come through, they are usually pretty obvious! Don’t tarnish your reputation by buying fake reviews. It’s not a good look.

• Bribing can get you in trouble. Online reviews should be left by real service customers only, and at their own will. If you bribe people to leave a review, you can get kicked off of popular review platforms like Yelp or TripAdvisor.

• Don’t spam customers with requests. If you don’t want to frustrate your customers, you should not continuously ask them to leave a review. If they did not want to leave one the first or second time you asked, you should wait a reasonable amount of time to ask again (after their next service).

Acquiring reviews is one thing, and responding to them is another! If you want to leverage these online testimonials as much as you can, you should be responding to both positive and negative reviews. There are certain things to keep in mind when responding to reviews, so be sure to know the best practices.

• Responding to positive reviews: Thank the reviewer, be brief and authentic, and invite them to share their experience with others.
• Responding to negative reviews: Acknowledge the issue, apologize, explain if necessary, and finish the conversation offline.

If you’re a pool cleaning company in the modern age, garnering online reviews is essential to your success. This new “word-of-mouth” marketing is a surefire way to get found online and book local service customers. Once you learn how to ask for reviews, responding to them is paramount. And once you do that, your online reviews will put you in front of anyone anytime they search for your services online—how great is that?