Google reviews for HVAC contractors: a year of enquiries in six weeks.

In the first hot week people are not comparing brands or reading about inverter efficiency. They want somebody who will come, who will not gouge them because it is thirty-eight degrees, and who will not disappear after the install.

That third one is the quiet fear and it drives more of the decision than price. Air conditioning is a four-figure purchase with a warranty on it, and everybody has heard of somebody whose installer could not be found when the unit failed.

So the reviews that convert in a heatwave are the ones about the business coming back. A review from somebody whose unit was serviced three summers after the install is worth more than any review about the install itself.

The other thing they scan for is whether they were upsold. Customers know they are in a weak negotiating position in a heatwave and they are looking for evidence you did not exploit it.

During the rush nobody in the business has a spare minute to ask for anything, so the busiest six weeks of the year generate almost no reviews. The profile then sits still for ten months.

That is the pattern on nearly every HVAC profile: a handful of reviews clustered oddly, long gaps, and nothing recent when the next hot week arrives and everybody starts searching.

The fix is not asking harder in January. It is that the ask has to be automatic, because a business installing four units a day in a heatwave is never going to do it by hand.

The quiet months are worth using differently. Autumn and winter are when service and maintenance customers exist, and those are the customers whose reviews prove the business is still there years later.

Why HVAC profiles look thin

• The busy weeks leave no time to ask.

  And they are the weeks with the most grateful customers.

• Installs are a one-off.

  The customer disappears for five years unless there is a service arrangement.

• Breakdowns get fixed and forgotten.

  Relief fades faster than gratitude for a new system.

An install customer needs a couple of days to use it before they can honestly say anything. A breakdown customer is most grateful the moment the air comes back on. Asking both the same way at the same time gets a poor result from one of them.

For an install, a few days is right. They have run it overnight, worked out the remote, and noticed whether the house actually gets cold. That is when they can write something specific rather than confirming a unit is on a wall.

For a breakdown or a service call, the same day is right, and the same afternoon is better. The relief is enormous and short-lived, and by tomorrow the customer has stopped thinking about the last two days entirely.

The commercial side is different again. A building manager or a shop owner on a maintenance agreement does not review a supplier, and they need to be asked directly, in person, usually around renewal.

Three customers, three asks

• The install, three days later.

  Once they have lived with it and know the house gets cold.

• The breakdown, the same afternoon.

  While the relief is at its peak.

• Commercial maintenance, at renewal.

  Asked in person by whoever they deal with, once a year at most.

An automatic message on a delay that suits the job type, from the business, with a link that opens the review box in one tap, plus a deliberate ask of the maintenance customers in the quiet months.

Automatic is the whole point in this trade. Any process that depends on somebody remembering fails in exactly the weeks it matters, and those are also the weeks with the most customers to ask.

The wording should mention something specific to ask about: whether the install was clean and tidy, whether the quote held, whether somebody explained how to actually run the thing. Customers respond better to a specific question than to a general request.

And replies matter more here than in most trades because of the warranty fear. A profile where the business responds to reviews, including two-star ones about a unit that failed, is evidence that the business answers its phone after the invoice is paid.

What the ask has to do

• Fire on a delay that fits the job.

  Days for an install, hours for a breakdown.

• Ask something specific.

  The tidiness, the quote, the explanation of the controls.

• Open the review box in one tap.

  Not a link to the profile.