gotchas.md
164 lines · small-business/skills/review-reputation/reference/gotchas.md at 2574e29
Gotchas — review-reputation
Raw lines 1 to 2Gotcha: Posting a public response without approval
Why it matters: A review response is permanent, public, and attributed to the owner by name. It is read by every future customer who finds the review. There is no version of "we'll fix it next run" that undoes it.
Raw lines 3 to 8✓ Good
Present each draft next to the review it answers and get a yes on that one before posting it. Approve one at a time — a batch approval on eight public responses is how the wrong one goes live.
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Gotcha: Blending rating averages across platforms
Why it matters: Google's 4.3 and Yelp's 4.0 describe different populations of reviewers. An average of the two is a number that exists nowhere, and the owner will repeat it to a customer or put it on a truck.
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Google: 4.3 (34 reviews), down from 4.6 last quarter. Yelp: 4.0 (11 visible). Different reviewer pools — not averaged.
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Gotcha: Treating a partial web scrape as a complete pull
Why it matters: Public review pages paginate, truncate, and reorder. A report built on the first page reads as the whole picture, so the owner concludes there are no new complaints when there are three on page two.
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Yelp (web, partial): 6 — page shows most recent only
Then ask for an export once. It takes the owner two minutes and fixes every run afterward.
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Gotcha: Ranking quiet customers by silence alone
Why it matters: A list sorted by longest gap fills with annual customers who are perfectly happy and one-time buyers who were never coming back. The owner works the top of the list, finds it worthless, and stops using it.
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Measure each customer against their own median interval, then rank by past value. Fifteen names the owner will actually call beats two hundred they won't. Put anyone who left a bad review and then went quiet at the top regardless of value — they said what was wrong and left anyway.
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Gotcha: Offering a discount the owner never authorized
Why it matters: A win-back message that promises 20% off is a commitment the owner has to honor once it lands. Drafting it before asking turns a churn problem into a margin problem, and the owner finds out when the customer redeems it.
Raw lines 76 to 82✗ Bad
Hi Dana — we've missed you. Here's 20% off your next service.
Nobody agreed to 20%.
Raw lines 83 to 88✓ Good
Ask what is on the table before drafting: an offer, a plain note, or a call from the owner. Draft only inside that answer, and say plainly when a call beats a coupon — an email to someone who spent USD 9,000 reads as a mailing list.
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Gotcha: Arguing with a reviewer in public
Why it matters: The audience is not the reviewer. It is the next customer reading the exchange, deciding how this business behaves when provoked. A correct, well-evidenced rebuttal still loses that reader.
Raw lines 97 to 102✗ Bad
Our records show the technician arrived within the scheduled window and our policy clearly states parts orders take 5-7 business days.Raw lines 103 to 107
✓ Good
Correct one factual point, offer a real contact route, and stop. Under 60 words. If the review breaks platform rules, explain the removal path to the owner honestly — including that most requests are declined — rather than promising it will come down.
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Gotcha: PayPal rate limits on dispute queries
Why it matters: PayPal's disputes API throttles aggressively on date windows with many disputes. Silent retries burn the user's time with no feedback.
Raw lines 117 to 120✗ Bad
Retry 3× automatically with no feedback. User sees a spinner for 30+ seconds before an error.
Raw lines 121 to 123✓ Good
On the first rate-limit error, skip PayPal, add PayPal: rate-limited — not included to the Sources section, and continue with the remaining connectors. Mention that the user can try again with a narrower date window.
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Gotcha: Verbatim quotes paraphrased or summarized
Why it matters: The owner needs to see the actual customer words — not Claude's interpretation. Paraphrase destroys the credibility of the report.
Raw lines 129 to 132✗ Bad
Theme: Slow shipping (8 signals)
Customers reported that deliveries arrived later than expected.Raw lines 133 to 136
✓ Good
Theme: Slow shipping (8 signals)
"Ordered 2 weeks ago and still nothing — this is unacceptable." — [Gmail] "Package was 10 days late and support never responded." — [Zoho Desk]
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Gotcha: HubSpot returning 0 tickets treated as an error
Why it matters: Test portals and new accounts legitimately have 0 tickets. Surfacing a warning creates noise and erodes trust.
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Record HubSpot tickets: 0 in the Sources section and continue. Only flag a connector issue if authentication itself fails.
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Gotcha: Gmail keyword list too narrow
Why it matters: Customers don't use standard complaint keywords. A 1-star experience often surfaces as "took forever" or "never again," not "disappointed."
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Use the full seed list in sources.md, which includes phrasings like "took forever" and "never again." Let theme extraction filter signal from noise — over-inclusion is cheaper than a missed theme.