Google reviews for fencing contractors: always one of three quotes.

Fencing is priced by the metre after a look, so a customer collects three numbers that are usually close together. The price does not separate anybody, which means the decision falls to whatever else is available, and that is the reviews.

This is a different competitive position to most trades. A plumber with a blocked drain is usually the only plumber the customer speaks to. A fencer is one of three, side by side, being read about on a phone at the kitchen table.

What separates the three is almost never the fence. It is who turned up to quote when they said, who sent the quote through afterwards rather than promising to, and whose reviews say they did what they said.

The middle quote wins more often than the cheapest, and reviews are the reason. Customers are wary of the lowest number and are looking for a justification to pay a bit more, which is exactly what a review page provides.

Half of what a fencing customer will eventually write about happens during the quoting, and most fencing businesses do not realise it. Arriving when you said and sending the quote the same evening is the thing customers describe.

The reason is that they have just been let down twice. The industry standard for quoting is not turning up, or turning up and never sending anything, and every customer collecting three quotes has experienced it that week.

So being ordinary and reliable at the quote stage is a genuine advantage, and it is what the reviews say. Read any good fencing business's profile and it is full of people describing basic professionalism as though it were remarkable, because to them it was.

This also means the ask can reference it. A customer who was impressed before the work started has more to say than one who is only reporting that a fence exists.

What customers actually write about

• Turned up to quote when they said.

  Ordinary, and rarer than it should be.

• Sent the quote through promptly.

  The most common complaint in the industry is silence after a site visit.

• Cleaned up and took the old fence away.

  The detail that separates a finished job from a mess.

• Talked to the neighbour.

  Which is where the second customer comes in.

A boundary fence is shared, and in most states the cost is too. That means two households are watching the job, both of them can review it, and the one who is not paying often has the stronger opinion about how it went.

Nobody in fencing treats the neighbour as a customer, and they are the most under-used source of reviews and referrals in the trade. They watched the whole job from their side, and they now need their other three boundaries done eventually.

The neighbour is also where the complaints come from. Disputes about the line, about access, about a gate, about who agreed to what. A fencing business that handles the neighbour well is preventing its own worst reviews.

Asking them is straightforward and almost nobody does it. They were part of the job, they saw it done properly, and a review from the household next door reads as unusually credible because they had nothing to gain.

The second customer nobody asks

• They watched the entire job.

  From the other side, for the whole day.

• They have their own boundaries.

  Which is future work, and they already know your work.

• They talk to their street.

  Fencing is a visible, contagious purchase along a road.

A short message the afternoon the job finishes, from the business, with a link that opens the review box in one tap, sent to every customer and offered to the neighbour on the day.

Same day matters in this trade because a fence is a one-day or two-day job with a visible result. The customer comes home, the fence is up, the site is clean, and that is the peak of their opinion of you.

It fades faster than most trades too. A fence becomes invisible within a fortnight. Nobody looks at a fence they own, so a request two weeks later reaches somebody with nothing to say.

Photographs are worth asking for here specifically. A fence is photogenic in a way a switchboard is not, and a review with a picture of a finished job is the closest thing a fencing business has to a portfolio that a stranger trusts.

What the ask has to do

• Go out the day it finishes.

  While the customer is looking at it for the first time.

• Ask for a photo.

  Fences photograph well, and a picture in a review does the work of a gallery.

• Include the neighbour, when it makes sense.

  They saw the whole thing and nobody has ever asked them.