Getting more Google reviews as an electrician

The job closes at the final inspection, not at the panel

Permitted electrical work carries an inspection cycle the customer never sees on the invoice. Seattle's building department is explicit about the shape of it: "Most permits require three electrical inspections: cover, service, and final", and "the contractor or installer is responsible for scheduling each inspection".¹ The same page notes that a project with a feeder to a subpanel needs feeder inspections scheduled separately as well.¹

That is a two-week gap between the moment the work feels finished to the homeowner and the moment it is legally finished, and the review ask usually lands inside it. Two things go wrong there. A review collected on the day the crew packs up is a review about the part of the job the customer watched, and it is written before anyone knows whether the final passes. And if the final does not pass, the correction happens after the five stars are already public, which is the one situation where the customer goes back and edits.

The practical rule is dull and it works: the ask goes out after the final inspection clears, from whoever tells the customer it cleared. That message already exists, because somebody has to say "you're signed off", and it is the only moment in an electrical job when the customer's relief and the job's completion are the same event.

Half your book cannot leave you a review, and it is the profitable half

An electrician's work splits between homeowners, who choose you and can review you, and general contractors, property managers and home-warranty dispatchers, who assign you and generally will not. The site super who watched your crew rough in forty units has no reason to open Google Maps, and the warranty dispatcher was never your customer in the first place.

So the arithmetic that works for a shop with a waiting room does not transfer. "Ask every customer" on a book that is sixty per cent commercial is an instruction that quietly aims at forty per cent of the work, and a target set against total job count will read as failure no matter how well the asking goes. Count the askable jobs first, then set the target against those.

There is a second-order effect worth naming: because the residential half skews toward emergencies (a dead panel, a burning smell, no power at 11 p.m.), the reviews an electrician does collect are weighted toward the worst nights of people's lives. That is good for the review text and hard on the timing, and it is another reason the ask belongs after the sign-off rather than in the doorway.

The tech holding the meter is the only person the customer met

On a residential call the customer met exactly one person from the company, and it was not the office. An ask that arrives from an address they have never seen, signed by a company they interacted with for ninety seconds on the phone, is asking a stranger for a favour on behalf of someone they liked.

Google's own guidance is to ask in person and to make the link easy to reach.² For an electrician those two sentences point at the same object: the short review link on the back of the tech's card, handed over at the panel by the person who just fixed the thing. What Google's policy forbids is the shortcut around it: offering anything of value for a review, or filtering who gets asked based on how happy they seem, both of which fall under its fake-engagement policy.³ A trade that runs on repeat referrals has more to lose from a suppressed review than from a bad one.