Heating season is review season

The first cold snap hits and the phone starts ringing. No-heat calls. Water heaters that picked the worst week to quit. Frozen pipes. For HVAC companies and plumbers, these are the busiest months of the year.

They are also the months when reviews get forgotten. Your techs are running from job to job, the office is juggling the schedule, and asking a customer for a review is the first thing to fall off the list. The jobs pile up. The reviews don't.

That is a missed opportunity in two ways. First, more jobs means more chances to earn reviews. Second, those reviews keep working for you after the rush ends. BrightLocal found that 74% of consumers only care about reviews written in the last three months, so the reviews you collect this winter are the ones homeowners see in spring.

Winter jobs also tend to land at the moment customers are most grateful. A family that just got its heat back on a cold night is about as happy as a customer gets. That feeling is real, and it fades fast. The ask has to happen while it's still fresh.

The answer isn't adding another task to your busiest season. It's taking the ask off everyone's plate. The review text should be sent the same way after every job, to every customer, whether the tech remembers or not. That consistency also keeps you on the right side of Google's policies, which prohibit only asking the customers you think will be happy.

Whatever software your team uses to run jobs, the principle is the same. When a job is marked done in PorchPrompt, the review text sends automatically. Nobody in the office has to touch it.

The contractors who come out of winter with the strongest profiles aren't the ones who worked the most jobs. They're the ones who asked on every one of them. By the time calls slow down in spring, your profile shows a full season of fresh reviews.