Review cards for tradies: what works when there is no counter

A cafe can leave a stand on the counter and let it do the asking. A plumber cannot. If you work out of a ute, the review either happens in the ninety seconds after you pack up, or it does not happen at all.

Why trades under-review so badly

Trades have the best raw material for reviews of almost any industry. The customer has just watched you fix something they could not fix, often something stressful, often on a day that was going badly. Gratitude is high and specific.

And yet the average small trade business has a fraction of the reviews of the average cafe, because there is no physical prompt and no routine. The job ends, you clean up, you leave, and the moment goes.

The card in the ute

A pocket card is the whole answer for mobile work. It costs nothing to carry, it does not need a surface, and handing it over turns an abstract request into a physical object. Three things make it work:

• Hand it over, do not leave it. A card left on a bench is a card that goes in the bin with the packaging. A card put in someone’s hand while you are talking to them gets used.
• Do it before you pack the last tool. Once you are visibly leaving, the customer has mentally moved on.
• Say what it is. “Tap your phone on that and it opens our Google page” is enough. People do not know what an NFC card is, and they do not need to.

The invoice route

If you invoice by email or SMS after the job, put the same link in the invoice. It is the one message you know they will open. A line at the bottom, plain text, no pressure: “If we did a good job, a Google review helps us more than you would think.”

This works alongside the card rather than instead of it. The card catches the people who will act immediately, the invoice catches the ones who pay on a Thursday night with time to spare.

What about the ones who do not answer the door

Real estate maintenance, strata work, rental repairs and anything done while the occupant is out are the hard cases. You are not going to get a review from someone who never saw you. For that work, the customer is the property manager or the agency, not the tenant, and they review differently: by giving you more work rather than by writing anything. Do not waste effort trying to force it.

A tile on the van

Some operators stick a tile or disc somewhere the customer stands anyway: the back door of the van, a clipboard, the folder the paperwork lives in. It is not as strong as a handed card but it removes one step, and for jobs where you are standing around waiting for a signature it gives people something to do.

Reviews and how people find a trade

Someone with a burst pipe is not browsing. They are searching, looking at the top three map results, and calling one. Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking, as part of what it calls prominence. It does not publish a number, and anyone who tells you there is a magic figure is guessing. What is clear is that a listing with forty reviews reads as a real business and one with two does not, regardless of what the algorithm thinks.

More on that in why your business does not show up in Google Maps.

Cards are configured with your Google review link before dispatch, so there is nothing to set up in the ute.