Repair Shop Advice

May 16, 2019

Yes! That may seem like an obvious answer, but many shop owners, shop managers and service advisors are hesitant to ask a customer to post a review.

Some people feel that asking a customer to post a review can come off as pushy or tacky. Others feel that if the customer isn’t going to do it on their own, then they didn’t really earn the review.

All of those feelings are completely understandable. However, here are a couple of important findings that come directly from our recent survey of nearly 600 auto repair shop customers:

• 18% posted reviews for a shop after not being asked
• 62% posted reviews for a shop after being asked

So, your customers are three times more likely to post a review if you ask them to than if you leave them to do it on their own. This is increasingly more important as your potential customers see reviews as the new social proof. Social proof is the concept that when people are inexperienced in making certain decisions they will seek out conformity and copy the actions of others to avoid making a mistake and not being accepted.

This explains one side of why reviews are an important tool to help you attract new customers from your online presence. Strongly positive reviews help assure potential customers that they will not be making a mistake by taking their vehicle to your repair shop, and the higher number of reviews that you have, the stronger the signals of conformity will be in their brain, even if they don’t realize that is what is driving them to make the decision.

The other side of why reviews are such an important tool in helping you attract new customers from the web is that Google uses reviews as a factor in where your auto repair shop is displayed on the local pack and in organic search results. For the local pack (the listings that are usually right below the map), the number one factor is how close your shop is to where the user is who is searching. But not too far behind that are:

• #12 – Quantity of Native Google Reviews (with text)
• #19 – High Numerical Ratings of Business by Google Users (4-5 stars)

Those rankings are out of around 200 factors.

And while you are asking a customer for a review, go ahead and ask them to mention the specific services you provided to them. That’s especially true if it’s a service you’d like to perform more of (maybe because of the high margins or the tech utilization) or that you have particular expertise in. The #14 factor for the Local Pack is “Product/Service Keywords in Reviews.”

If engine replacement is a service you want to provide as many times as you possibly can, then be sure that you ask the customer for a review every time you perform an engine replacement. And specifically ask them to include the words engine replacement in the review.

The same is true if you prefer to service BMWs. Ask your BMW customers to specifically include BMW in their reviews.

To sum it up, yes, ask your happy customers to post reviews for your auto repair shop, especially on Google and Facebook. And don’t stop there, ask them to include specifics about the services that you provided and their experience in working with you.

If you are interested in hearing more about reviews, we encourage you to listen to Episode 5 of our Busy Bays Podcast – What are your Google Reviews doing for you?

And if you’d like help getting more reviews and responding to them, please contact us at 866-665-1605 or Team_RSW@RepairShopWebsites.com.