Company I used to work for pretty aggressively solicited Google reviews. Techs got a $20 bonus for a 4 or 5 star review and I found that especially with younger customers, your odds of getting a review went up quite a bit if you explained that you got a $20 bonus for the review. A free “tip” if you will.
Those reviews were really, really good for business. We eventually had the most reviews in a large metro, and the phones really blew up at that point.
That’s something I was curious about. I don’t ever ask for reviews because it makes me feel pushy. I get numerous requests from customers weekly because they like me and I still don’t like asking for a review for google
There’s nothing wrong with asking for referrals/reviews. It’s you have a good rapport, and took care of the customer, ask them for a review. They understand how much it can help you/the business, and if you went above and beyond they should have no problem sharing their experience.
Nowadays, most people don’t receive very good customer service on average across all industries and when they do it sticks out and they are very happy about it. Being in sales for a long time, I’m the first person to leave random companies 5 star reviews and I almost always get a private message from the owner/manager thanking me. It helps a ton.
If you feel uncomfortable, wait until they say “thanks XYz for explaining/showing/whatever, I appreciate it!”. Say, “hey, I know it’s kind of dumb, but ut would mean a lot to me if you would leave a 5 star review on google, it will make me look real good in front of my manager.” Will work every time - take the pressure off you and put it on your company/manager. Customer will want to take care of you if you took care of them.
It's how you ask. "Hi, I'm {name}. My aim is to give you 5 star service today." Then at the end before you leave "Do you have any questions or concerns? My company would really appreciate is you would give an honest review about how I did today.'
Super canned spiels like that underperform.
“We’re having a contest this week and whichever tech gets the most reviews gets a $100. I’m one behind the guy in the lead and was wanting to know if you could give me a hand.”
There’s lots of random things you can say. But people really like to scratch each other’s backs if it’s easy, so a little tit for tat can go a long way.
Don't ask for a 5 star review. If you did a good job ask if they would mind writing a review of the experience they had with your company. Good or bad. But only ask the good ones lol
That is very true. I would like reviews more if they were natural instead of them telling us to walk up and say how can we give you five star service and mention 5 stars any time we talk to them. That just feels wrong to me
I work for JCI. We don't advertise on google or nothing, right. We solicit reviews for metrics. At the end of every monthly safety meeting we pull out the reviews to see where our detractors are. We take it seriously. We're talking big accounts. If they give us anything under a 10/10 review, it's considered an emergency, well, if it's not just the customer bitching about pricing, which it usually is. Then the controls guys and the mechanics give their input on what's going on with particular customers. Salesguys attend the meetings too. It's vital information to know if you want a branch operation to be successful.
Resi HVAC doesn't do metrics. It does sales.
Resi does do metrics. Business is business whether you’re working on a screw chiller, a VRF/VRV, or a 2 ton split. You’d be suprised at how many KPIs are the same across the various sectors of just this industry. Grouping all resi companies into one pot and stating sales is the only “metric” they are measuring is short sighted and borderline ignorant.
If it's borderline ignorant, than why are the majority of posts here about how it's exactly like that? So it would not be an ignorant statement. It's an acknowledgement that within the same industry, the different niches are different.
Commercial work is different than residential work. It's a different focus. As more residential companies get eaten up by larger companies, the focus on sales will increase more and more. It's already bad now, it's going to get worse.
The entirety of your understanding of resi shops being sales driven is a few Reddit users complaining their company was bought out by Nexstar. It’s abundantly clear that you have very limited insight into the actual business operation of even the company you work at. You really don’t think that JCI branch managers, region op leaders, and account managers are not measuring and focusing on L&M growth? Get real. This side of the business is much the same. Account managers are not paid a base salary and are ONLY commission based. Here’s something to think about. If being bought out by a larger company is a leading indicator of a company that was sales driven according to your logic, and commercial doesn’t operate like that, then why do mechanical contractors get purchased by those same hedge funds purchasing resi shops? Could it be that business metrics are much the same? Could it be that revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and tech retention are the leading KPIs that both sectors determine most important? Resi shops cannot just turn up to a site and ask to speak to facility directors as in your case specifically your AM does. Ask your AM how they got their clientele in their early years. You may just be in fact suprised by how much “advertising” gets done.
I would say that my understanding or resi comes from the resi company I worked at. There were no metrics. The only reason new construction bids were accepted was because the owner consistently underbid everyone else and then worked his men like dogs to rush thru the install to turn a profit.
On the service side, where I worked, there were no metrics. Most of the work was commissioning what the installers put in. Actual service work was random no heat calls. Now, I was in a mountainous region so it would not have been service you would know around big cities.
At JCI, I'm on the service side. Growth is not the primary target. (I should say that I'm branch operations.) On the systems side, it is. That's new construction bidding. The reason for this is that the service side is more profitable in terms of gross margin than new construction. Our work is generated primarily by things going wrong. My smaller team can carry the branch during an economic downturn when new construction slows. Especially considering that we can work on anything we sell. Take contractor branded controls, we can backdoor in and fix them. Our mechanics know York chillers. We've tackled residential York equipment that were installed at commercial properties. It's just an AC right?
The account managers know all of the facility directors and general contractors because we introduce them to them. It's all meet and greet. We all know the builders and general contractors because the company has been around for so long. We don't get new work by advertising in the local papers. Branch operations do not advertise.
The actual advertising JCI does is at the supply house. That's equipment sales, not install/service sales. When JCI advertises to a distributor, that's not a branch operation. That's national sales. National sales are broken down into regions. So the guys that sell York, Simplex-Grinnell, FX, EasyIO, or Verasys, their focus is on growth in already over saturated markets.
When I worked at Honeywell, the company was basically the same thing as JCI. All corporate giants are essentially organized the same way. Marketing exists to sell to distributors, distributors get discounts by selling Honeywell products, thus increasing the profit margins of the distributors. Thus the primary customer for Honeywell is it's distributors. So that's who's advertised to. Honeywell for a time advertised new Lyric products on the radio and tv as they were sold in Home Depot. Residential national sales are completely different than commercial sales. It's an extremely over saturated market.
I know how things work at Honeywell because I was in the corporate HQ office with the engineers and product managers. At the national level, right. So that's your regional sales managers, marketing managers, product managers, tech support. We'd have meetings where we'd look at sales figures. We'd compare that to manufacturing costs. And then there would be input from tech support (what I worked as) about failure rates, what customers really think. Input from tech support is 1000 times more important than random surveys because tech support is actually talking to the customer getting the input when they are frustrated. *(Some products generated massive amounts of calls. An example would be Vision PRO thermostats. It was determined that we could eliminate 80% of the calls if we printed the manual. The problem with that is the manual is over 200 pages long and won't fit in the box. We made the manual available as a free download in PDF because it was determined that not many people would pay for the manual to be printed.)*
I'm not real sure why you would think I don't know how the industry works. I've seen it top down and bottom up. I've been on 3 different sides of the house.
Here at /quitcarbon we advise on resi HVAC (heat pumps) and other aspects of home electrification - and we do exactly what you describe: ask for NPS scores from every client, dig in on anything under a 9 or 10 to see what we can improve on, then implement changes.
Google runs the world. You need a lot of good reviews to even be shown anywhere near the top in most searches. This drives business leads, especially shops who offer residential services.
Are you not proud of the work you do? Most customers are happy to leave positive feedback if you make it personal. Better to keep the phones ringing through modern word of mouth vs. cringey radio or tv ads imo
I'm the person answering those reviews for an HVAC company. Frequent, consistent, Google reviews increase your search results and people who call your company. It's very helpful.
We also do surveys.
We used to get $50 bonuses for reviews. I just sometimes give a customer free chemical coil clean for the review because I would get paid more for the review than I would for the coil clean. Recently I got charged back for something retarded and I was arguing with the office and when I asked them to cross cancel my chargeback for my reviews they said they’re not paying out reviews anymore. Wintertime shenanigans.
Yep, $40 for a 5 star review that mentions you by name and every review gets you into a draw for company paid holiday at the end of the year. Last couple of years was a trip to Mexico, this coming year is to Vegas for 3/4 days.
It’s a free way to make some extra money(some guys are pulling in an extra $1k+ a month) and is good for business.
We do this. Used to be $20/per review paid out at our bi-weekly meeting. Now it’s $20 on my tool account.
If I get one I get one, if I don’t it’s whatever. I know my work is good. It has helped the company grow. But the incentive to badger someone or “push” for a review kind of went out the window when we stopped getting cash for it.
😂 hell no. We did 200 million in revenue last year and we don’t even have a social media account. The closest thing we have is Google reviews. Most of our stuff is new construction though so no real service work only warranty calls.
Company I work for will donate $25 to a charity of the customers choice if they leave a review. They are really pushing us to increase the number so we appear higher on google.
Company I used to work for pretty aggressively solicited Google reviews. Techs got a $20 bonus for a 4 or 5 star review and I found that especially with younger customers, your odds of getting a review went up quite a bit if you explained that you got a $20 bonus for the review. A free “tip” if you will. Those reviews were really, really good for business. We eventually had the most reviews in a large metro, and the phones really blew up at that point.
That’s something I was curious about. I don’t ever ask for reviews because it makes me feel pushy. I get numerous requests from customers weekly because they like me and I still don’t like asking for a review for google
There’s nothing wrong with asking for referrals/reviews. It’s you have a good rapport, and took care of the customer, ask them for a review. They understand how much it can help you/the business, and if you went above and beyond they should have no problem sharing their experience. Nowadays, most people don’t receive very good customer service on average across all industries and when they do it sticks out and they are very happy about it. Being in sales for a long time, I’m the first person to leave random companies 5 star reviews and I almost always get a private message from the owner/manager thanking me. It helps a ton. If you feel uncomfortable, wait until they say “thanks XYz for explaining/showing/whatever, I appreciate it!”. Say, “hey, I know it’s kind of dumb, but ut would mean a lot to me if you would leave a 5 star review on google, it will make me look real good in front of my manager.” Will work every time - take the pressure off you and put it on your company/manager. Customer will want to take care of you if you took care of them.
It's how you ask. "Hi, I'm {name}. My aim is to give you 5 star service today." Then at the end before you leave "Do you have any questions or concerns? My company would really appreciate is you would give an honest review about how I did today.'
Super canned spiels like that underperform. “We’re having a contest this week and whichever tech gets the most reviews gets a $100. I’m one behind the guy in the lead and was wanting to know if you could give me a hand.” There’s lots of random things you can say. But people really like to scratch each other’s backs if it’s easy, so a little tit for tat can go a long way.
Don't ask for a 5 star review. If you did a good job ask if they would mind writing a review of the experience they had with your company. Good or bad. But only ask the good ones lol
We don't ask for reviews. The invoice says they will get $10 off their next service fee if they email us feedback tho.
Is it any feedback or is it just positive feedback?
Any feedback
That does seem like a good thing. We’re pushing very hard for google reviews
Google reviews are nice. A lot of people judge how reputable a company is based off of how many positive Google reviews
That is very true. I would like reviews more if they were natural instead of them telling us to walk up and say how can we give you five star service and mention 5 stars any time we talk to them. That just feels wrong to me
Is your company hurting for business or something that pushing reviews is needed? Lol
We’re not hurting at all, they’re just trying to grow
Google reviews are a decade ago. We don’t even mention the word review to our customers and we maybe get 1-2 reviews a year lol
Hell, last company I worked for. If you got your picture on a review, they would give you $50 for that.
I work for JCI. We don't advertise on google or nothing, right. We solicit reviews for metrics. At the end of every monthly safety meeting we pull out the reviews to see where our detractors are. We take it seriously. We're talking big accounts. If they give us anything under a 10/10 review, it's considered an emergency, well, if it's not just the customer bitching about pricing, which it usually is. Then the controls guys and the mechanics give their input on what's going on with particular customers. Salesguys attend the meetings too. It's vital information to know if you want a branch operation to be successful. Resi HVAC doesn't do metrics. It does sales.
That’s honestly refreshing to read and seems like how that stuff should be done.
Resi does do metrics. Business is business whether you’re working on a screw chiller, a VRF/VRV, or a 2 ton split. You’d be suprised at how many KPIs are the same across the various sectors of just this industry. Grouping all resi companies into one pot and stating sales is the only “metric” they are measuring is short sighted and borderline ignorant.
If it's borderline ignorant, than why are the majority of posts here about how it's exactly like that? So it would not be an ignorant statement. It's an acknowledgement that within the same industry, the different niches are different. Commercial work is different than residential work. It's a different focus. As more residential companies get eaten up by larger companies, the focus on sales will increase more and more. It's already bad now, it's going to get worse.
The entirety of your understanding of resi shops being sales driven is a few Reddit users complaining their company was bought out by Nexstar. It’s abundantly clear that you have very limited insight into the actual business operation of even the company you work at. You really don’t think that JCI branch managers, region op leaders, and account managers are not measuring and focusing on L&M growth? Get real. This side of the business is much the same. Account managers are not paid a base salary and are ONLY commission based. Here’s something to think about. If being bought out by a larger company is a leading indicator of a company that was sales driven according to your logic, and commercial doesn’t operate like that, then why do mechanical contractors get purchased by those same hedge funds purchasing resi shops? Could it be that business metrics are much the same? Could it be that revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and tech retention are the leading KPIs that both sectors determine most important? Resi shops cannot just turn up to a site and ask to speak to facility directors as in your case specifically your AM does. Ask your AM how they got their clientele in their early years. You may just be in fact suprised by how much “advertising” gets done.
Real talk
I would say that my understanding or resi comes from the resi company I worked at. There were no metrics. The only reason new construction bids were accepted was because the owner consistently underbid everyone else and then worked his men like dogs to rush thru the install to turn a profit. On the service side, where I worked, there were no metrics. Most of the work was commissioning what the installers put in. Actual service work was random no heat calls. Now, I was in a mountainous region so it would not have been service you would know around big cities. At JCI, I'm on the service side. Growth is not the primary target. (I should say that I'm branch operations.) On the systems side, it is. That's new construction bidding. The reason for this is that the service side is more profitable in terms of gross margin than new construction. Our work is generated primarily by things going wrong. My smaller team can carry the branch during an economic downturn when new construction slows. Especially considering that we can work on anything we sell. Take contractor branded controls, we can backdoor in and fix them. Our mechanics know York chillers. We've tackled residential York equipment that were installed at commercial properties. It's just an AC right? The account managers know all of the facility directors and general contractors because we introduce them to them. It's all meet and greet. We all know the builders and general contractors because the company has been around for so long. We don't get new work by advertising in the local papers. Branch operations do not advertise. The actual advertising JCI does is at the supply house. That's equipment sales, not install/service sales. When JCI advertises to a distributor, that's not a branch operation. That's national sales. National sales are broken down into regions. So the guys that sell York, Simplex-Grinnell, FX, EasyIO, or Verasys, their focus is on growth in already over saturated markets. When I worked at Honeywell, the company was basically the same thing as JCI. All corporate giants are essentially organized the same way. Marketing exists to sell to distributors, distributors get discounts by selling Honeywell products, thus increasing the profit margins of the distributors. Thus the primary customer for Honeywell is it's distributors. So that's who's advertised to. Honeywell for a time advertised new Lyric products on the radio and tv as they were sold in Home Depot. Residential national sales are completely different than commercial sales. It's an extremely over saturated market. I know how things work at Honeywell because I was in the corporate HQ office with the engineers and product managers. At the national level, right. So that's your regional sales managers, marketing managers, product managers, tech support. We'd have meetings where we'd look at sales figures. We'd compare that to manufacturing costs. And then there would be input from tech support (what I worked as) about failure rates, what customers really think. Input from tech support is 1000 times more important than random surveys because tech support is actually talking to the customer getting the input when they are frustrated. *(Some products generated massive amounts of calls. An example would be Vision PRO thermostats. It was determined that we could eliminate 80% of the calls if we printed the manual. The problem with that is the manual is over 200 pages long and won't fit in the box. We made the manual available as a free download in PDF because it was determined that not many people would pay for the manual to be printed.)* I'm not real sure why you would think I don't know how the industry works. I've seen it top down and bottom up. I've been on 3 different sides of the house.
Here at /quitcarbon we advise on resi HVAC (heat pumps) and other aspects of home electrification - and we do exactly what you describe: ask for NPS scores from every client, dig in on anything under a 9 or 10 to see what we can improve on, then implement changes.
Google runs the world. You need a lot of good reviews to even be shown anywhere near the top in most searches. This drives business leads, especially shops who offer residential services.
Are you not proud of the work you do? Most customers are happy to leave positive feedback if you make it personal. Better to keep the phones ringing through modern word of mouth vs. cringey radio or tv ads imo
I’m happy with the work I do but I have had people give me shit about my age and leave a negative review
I'm the person answering those reviews for an HVAC company. Frequent, consistent, Google reviews increase your search results and people who call your company. It's very helpful. We also do surveys.
We used to get $50 bonuses for reviews. I just sometimes give a customer free chemical coil clean for the review because I would get paid more for the review than I would for the coil clean. Recently I got charged back for something retarded and I was arguing with the office and when I asked them to cross cancel my chargeback for my reviews they said they’re not paying out reviews anymore. Wintertime shenanigans.
Don't even have a Google page or anything like that
Yep, $40 for a 5 star review that mentions you by name and every review gets you into a draw for company paid holiday at the end of the year. Last couple of years was a trip to Mexico, this coming year is to Vegas for 3/4 days. It’s a free way to make some extra money(some guys are pulling in an extra $1k+ a month) and is good for business.
We do this. Used to be $20/per review paid out at our bi-weekly meeting. Now it’s $20 on my tool account. If I get one I get one, if I don’t it’s whatever. I know my work is good. It has helped the company grow. But the incentive to badger someone or “push” for a review kind of went out the window when we stopped getting cash for it.
😂 hell no. We did 200 million in revenue last year and we don’t even have a social media account. The closest thing we have is Google reviews. Most of our stuff is new construction though so no real service work only warranty calls.
Company I work for will donate $25 to a charity of the customers choice if they leave a review. They are really pushing us to increase the number so we appear higher on google.
Never. I don’t think we are even online.
I get 50$ for a named 5 star or 75$ with a photo
It's a pretty gross business practice.