You see each customer once a year, so your reviews age on a twelve-month clock

There is a second thing going on, and it is specific to gas.

Your customer is letting someone into their home to work on the one thing in the house that can kill them. That is not hyperbole; it is why Gas Safe registration exists and why it is legally mandatory at around £310 a year.

A stranger choosing a gas engineer is doing a trust assessment far more anxious than choosing a decorator. They will read more reviews, more carefully, and they are specifically scanning for anything that suggests carelessness. One review mentioning that you left without explaining something does more damage in this trade than in any other.

The flip side is that a review saying “explained exactly what he was doing and why, showed me the readings, gave me the certificate before he left” is worth several ordinary ones — because it directly answers the fear.

Spread the asking across the year. This is the whole trick for your trade. You cannot spread the work — the boilers get serviced when they get serviced — but you can stagger when the requests go out, so a January customer’s request lands in January rather than being batched with everyone else’s.

Ask for the safety detail by name. “If you have a minute, it helps if you mention whether everything was explained clearly.” That single prompt produces the reviews that convert anxious customers.

Ask landlords separately and differently. An agent cares about the certificate arriving on time, not about how pleasant you were. Their review should say so.

Reply with something useful every time. “Glad it was clear — for anyone reading, a service takes about an hour and the certificate goes out the same day” turns each reply into an answer to the question every reader has.

Use the quiet months deliberately. Spring is when your competitors’ profiles go stale. A steady trickle of reviews from March to July puts you ahead before the season starts, which is exactly the same argument as the visibility work and for the same reason.

Only having autumn reviews. It is the default state of this trade and it is a real, quantifiable disadvantage every spring.

Asking on the doorstep. You are the last person they want to do a favour for while they are getting back to their day. The next morning works far better.

Never asking the landlords. They are the most valuable customers you have and the least likely to be asked.

Treating a complaint as an argument. In a safety trade, a defensive reply reads badly to every future reader. Reply once, factually, and offer to sort it privately.

Letting the whole thing depend on you remembering. In November you are flat out. That is precisely when the asking stops, and precisely when you most want it running.

This is the clearest case on the site, because the whole trade runs on a calendar and so does the review problem.

Every completed service creates the request. Landlord certificates carry their own flow, worded for an agent. Churn risk flags the customers who did not rebook, and a review request is often the cheapest way to reopen that conversation.

And because the service reminder and the review request come off the same record, an existing customer hears from you twice a year without you doing anything — which for a trade that loses customers to silence is the entire game.