You got out the stain they were embarrassed to mention.

Carpet cleaning is a strangely intimate hire. You're inside the house, moving furniture, working on the wine stain from the party and the pet accident nobody talks about. The customer is trusting you with the house and a bit of embarrassment at the same time. Then the review says "great service, carpets look good." Which skips the two things the next customer is desperate to know: whether stains like theirs actually come out, and whether the crew was decent about it.

Later that day or the next morning, once the carpet is dry and the stains have clearly stayed gone. That short wait produces a much better review, because the customer can write that the stain never came back rather than that it looked good when you left.

No. Ask once, after they've settled into using you, so the review is about consistency rather than a single clean. A property manager asked after every turnover stops responding, and you've spent a good account for nothing.

Ask anyway. A customer who writes that you were honest about what a twenty-year-old carpet could realistically look like, and delivered exactly that, gives future customers a more useful picture than another perfect five-star. Honest expectations are a selling point in this trade.

Only if the customer writes it themselves. small Talk never asks a customer to name an employee and never inserts a name into a draft, because Google's policy addresses solicited employee mentions. A customer naming someone on their own is writing their own review.

No. Google's platform policy prohibits offering anything of value in exchange for a Google review, and the FTC's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule separately addresses incentives conditioned on sentiment. small Talk has no incentive mechanic in the product.