Plumbing isn’t the kind of work people enjoy talking about. The hot water came back, the leak stopped, the sink drains again, and that’s the end of it. The customer’s relief is private. They don’t sit down to write a paragraph about it on a Tuesday night. Most plumbers know this and quietly assume reviews are a problem for cafes and personal trainers. They aren’t. The customers just need to be asked the right way, at the right time.
Here’s how to actually get reviews as a plumber, sparky or any service business where the work is invisible the moment it works, without nagging your customers or sounding like every other tradie chasing five stars.
The reason plumbing reviews are harder to get
A new haircut is visible. A renovation is visible. A working drain is not. When a plumbing job goes well, the customer’s day quietly resumes. There is no moment of pride or ceremony where it occurs to them to write something down. That is the actual problem. It is not that customers don’t like you. It is that the job ended for them the moment the water moved again. Most plumbers are trying to extract a review from someone who has already mentally moved on. If you don’t ask while the relief is still fresh, you have already missed the window.
The three windows where the customer is most willing
The best window for a review is the moment the work has visibly worked. The hot water comes on. The toilet flushes properly. The new tapware runs clean. Stand there with them for ten seconds, watch it work together, and that is when to ask. The second window is when you hand over a clean site at the end of a bigger job. The third is the morning after, when they have used the fix once or twice and noticed how good it feels not to have a leaking laundry. Outside those windows, the willingness to bother drops fast. By day three, the job is invisible again.
Send the request from a person, not a system
Customers can spot an automated review chase a kilometre away. The all-in-one tradie booking platforms send the same template that ten other tradies have already sent. It feels generic because it is. A single line from your own number, with the customer’s name on it, lands differently. Something like, hey Mark, glad the gas heater sorted itself out, if you ever feel like leaving a quick line on Reviewey about how it went, it would mean a lot. That’s it. No template, no big paragraph, no awkward tap-here button. The fact that you wrote it yourself is half the reason they’ll bother.
Stop calling it a review, call it a job followup
The word review carries weight a lot of customers don’t want. It sounds formal, like they need to write something balanced and considered. It also sounds like a favour. Ask for a few quick lines about how the job went instead. The customer answers a normal question about a normal job. You can then mention you’d be grateful if they put those words on Reviewey when they have a minute. They’ve already done the hard part. The publishing bit is the easy part because they aren’t starting from a blank page.
Make it stupid easy to leave
Once the customer has agreed in principle, do not make them go searching. Send a single message with the direct link to your business page on Reviewey. No tracking parameters, no fancy QR code on a flyer they will lose, no app download. Just the link. The fewer steps between yes and posted, the more reviews you will actually get. If you can shorten the URL into something memorable for word of mouth, that helps too. The whole goal is to remove every reason a busy customer might quietly close the tab.
The number is not the goal
A wall of identical five-star reviews looks like a wall of identical five-star reviews. Future customers can tell. What matters more is variety. A four-star with a thoughtful comment about how the job ran a day late but was finished properly says more about your business than ten fives that just say great work. Don’t try to script the answer. Don’t drop hints. Don’t turn the request into a coaching session. The quickest way to look fake on a review platform is to chase the perfect score instead of letting customers describe their actual experience.
What to do when a happy customer says they’re “not really into reviews”
Some customers will smile and tell you they don’t really do online reviews. Don’t push. Don’t try to convince them. Thank them for the feedback, leave the door open, and move on. Half of them will write something three months later when they remember a small detail and feel oddly compelled to. The other half won’t, and that’s fine too. You will get more reviews from twenty light, polite asks than from one customer you talked into doing something they didn’t want to do. Pressure leaves a worse impression than a missing review ever will.
The followup nobody sends
About four to six weeks after the job, send a short check-in. Hey Mark, just wanted to make sure the heater is still running well. That is the message almost no plumber sends, and it is the one customers remember. It signals that you cared about the work past the day you got paid. A surprising number of those customers will follow up with a review unprompted, because the message itself reminded them how unusual it felt to have a tradie who actually circled back. Reviews are a side effect of customer care, not a substitute for it.
The plumbers who consistently build a good public record on Reviewey are not the ones with the slickest review-collection software. They are the ones who ask while the work is fresh, ask in their own voice, and stop expecting customers to do something the customers were never going to do unprompted. Build the ask into the job, not after the job. The reviews will follow.