A real person calls your customers.
For reviews, for feedback, and for better word of mouth. Not a text blast. Not an email blast. A phone call from The Local Aim, about a week after the job.
For HVAC, plumbing, roofing, electrical, and pest control businesses in Orange County.
of customers leave a review after an email request.
click the review link in a text request. That counts clicks, not finished reviews.
What nobody knows yet
No one publishes independent response rates for phone calls compared with texts or emails. That includes us, for now. We are tracking our own call-to-review rate and will publish it after three months of data.
$800 a month. No setup fee. No contract. Every call recorded with consent.
Paid ads cost more, and AI answers take clicks.
Clicks cost more
The average Google Ads click cost $5.42 in 2026, up from $5.26 in 2025. That is more than double the 2016 average. Home & Home Improvement averaged $8.33 per click, second highest of 23 industries, behind only legal services. The average Home & Home Improvement lead cost $90.92.
To be fair: the average cost per lead across all industries fell in 2026, to $66.69. It was the first drop in five years.
AI answers come first
When Google showed an AI summary, people clicked a regular search result on 8% of visits. Without one, they clicked on 15%.
That study covered all kinds of searches, not just local ones. Google disputed the method. Still, the direction is clear: more answers show up before anyone clicks.
Reviews don't replace your ads. They are what people read before they call.
What customers look at before they call.
of consumers read reviews for local businesses.
look for reviews written in the last three months. 32% want reviews from the last two weeks, up from 20% a year earlier.
use Google to read local reviews, down from 83% a year earlier. Use of AI tools for local recommendations rose from 6% to 45%.
More reviews, more clicks
In one 2026 study of 100,000 Google Business Profiles, profiles with 50+ reviews got 4.4 times more clicks than profiles with fewer than 5.
Google says reviews count
Google ranks local results on relevance, distance, and prominence. Google says review count and review score are part of prominence. You can't change your distance. You can build prominence.
Hear about problems before they go public.
A customer has a bad experience. They can post about it on Google the same day, and every prospect sees it, sometimes before you know anything happened.
of consumers say negative reviews make them less likely to use a business.
A PROOF call happens about a week after the job. If something went wrong, the customer can tell a real person. That complaint reaches you the same day, so you can fix it while it's still a phone conversation.
Negative reviews still happen. PROOF doesn't stop them. It means you hear first, and we have a written process for responding to every kind of negative review.
Why we call about a week after the job.
A 2023 study in the Journal of Marketing ran two randomized field experiments with more than 300,000 online marketplace customers. One tested review reminders sent the next day, and at 5, 9, and 13 days. Reminders sent too soon lowered the chance of a review. Later reminders raised it.
That study covered online purchases and app reminders, not phone calls or home services. So we treat it as a guide and track our own timing.
What a week of outreach looks like.
- CalledA recent customer, about 6 days after the job. Asked for an honest review, good or bad.
- FlaggedAnyone due for follow-up work or willing to refer you is logged and sent to you.
- CaughtComplaints that come up on a call reach you the same day.
- LoggedEvery dial and every outcome goes into your monthly report.
Every customer we reach is asked for an honest review, whatever they thought. Nothing is filtered. Every call is recorded with consent from both sides, and you can hear any recording on request.
PROOF: Personal Review Outreach & Online Footprint
No setup fee. No contract. Cancel anytime.
Start PROOFWe take one business per trade, per zip code.
- Live calls to recent customers, made under The Local Aim name. Not a bot. Not a text blast.
- Honest review requests. Every customer we reach is asked, whatever they thought.
- Repeat and referral flags passed to you.
- Same-day complaint routing.
- AI and Google visibility snapshot. Dated searches across Google, Maps, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
- Google Business Profile content help.
- Monthly customer feedback log. What customers liked and didn't, by name.
- Full call report. Every dial accounted for.
- BS Tracker Reality Check. A framework for checking any vendor's claims.
- Monthly feature on The Local Aim, with your work videos and customer photos.
Customer names and phone numbers are used only for this outreach. They are never entered into AI tools and never shared.
What else you could buy instead.
DIY review software
About $75–$99 a month for one location. NiceJob Grow is $75 a month. GatherUp Small Business is $99 a month. Both are month to month. It's the cheapest option, but an automated text or email still does the asking.
Hiring part-time help
Customer service reps earn a national median of $21.53 an hour. Ten hours a week comes to roughly $1,040 a month with estimated payroll tax, before anything else in PROOF.
Done-for-you service
These start around $300 a month. Localplus charges $299 a month for automated email and text review requests, a specialist, and monthly calls. Its $499 plan adds AI search visibility. That's cheaper than PROOF, and we'd rather you hear it from us. Their requests are automated. Ours are live calls.
That live calls beat automated requests is our reasoning, not a sourced statistic. No independent data compares them for home services.
How month one works.
- Week 1Your feature goes live. Calls to your recent customers begin. Reviews can start landing.
- Week 2A check-in with what's happened: calls made, reviews posted, anything flagged.
- Weeks 3–4Calls continue. Reviews come in at a natural pace. Your visibility snapshot updates.
- Day 30You decide: keep going, take it in-house, or stop. No lock-in.
Is this for you?
Yes, if
- You run Google Ads or Local Services Ads in Orange County.
- You're in HVAC, plumbing, roofing, electrical, or pest control.
- Your customer list goes quiet after the invoice.
- You want to know what customers actually say.
- You treat customers well. This only works if the work is good.
Not for
- Anyone who wants a guaranteed review count or star rating.
- A business with a real pattern of service complaints. That's an operations problem.
- Anyone in an active negative-review crisis. Ask about RAPID.
Straight answers.
What if the caller says the wrong thing?
Every call is recorded with consent from both sides, and you can hear any recording on request. If something goes wrong on a call, you'll hear exactly what happened.
How is this different from automated review tools?
Automated tools send the same message to everyone. We call customers one at a time and have a real conversation, so complaints, referrals, and repeat work surface too.
What do you need from me?
A list of recent customers: first name and phone number. We handle the rest.
How do I know it's working?
You see reviews post on your profile. You get email updates, usually every other day, the full call log, and a monthly report on where you show up in Google and AI search.
Do I sign a contract?
No. No setup fee, no contract, cancel anytime. In month one, you're testing us, and we're testing fit too.
Who's behind this.
The Local Aim is a local media and research operation covering Orange County home services businesses, run by its founder, Kirby. Business owners kept asking us how to get more customers. After the research, we built a service around what holds up when you check the sources: real calls, real reviews, real reports.
$800 a month gets your customers called, plus a monthly feature and a dated look at where you stand in search and AI. No setup fee. No contract.
Start PROOF Book a 15-minute call