Legibility — Output a Customer Can Act On
Review Replies and Service-Page Copy: Writing for People Who Are Deciding
Your reply to a bad review is read by everyone who comes after. Here is how to write it, and how to write service pages that answer the real question.
Review replies are not for the reviewer
The person who left the two-star review has already made up their mind. Your reply is for the next forty people who read it while deciding whether to call you.
That reframing changes everything about how you write it. You are not winning an argument. You are demonstrating, in public, how you behave when something goes wrong.
The shape of a good reply to a bad review
Four moves, in order, and short:
- Thank them, specifically. Not "thank you for your feedback."
- Acknowledge the actual thing. Name it. Do not soften it into vagueness.
- State what you did or will do. Concrete.
- Move it offline. A name and a direct way to reach you.
What to leave out: excuses, explanations of how busy you were, any suggestion the customer is mistaken, and — above all — the phrase "we're sorry you feel that way," which reads as an insult to every future reader.
> [paste business brief]
>
> Draft a reply to this review. Follow these rules:
> - Under 90 words.
> - Thank them for something specific they said.
> - Acknowledge the actual complaint plainly. Do not minimise it.
> - Say what we're doing about it.
> - Offer a direct contact to continue offline.
> - No excuses. Do not say "we're sorry you feel that way." Do not blame weather, scheduling, or the customer.
> - Do not offer a refund or discount — I'll decide that separately.
>
> Review (2 stars): "Booked a house wash for Tuesday. Nobody showed and nobody called. When I rang, I was told it was rescheduled for weather. It was sunny. Work was fine when they finally came Thursday but I took a day off for nothing."
Note the rule about refunds. Money decisions are yours. Never let generated text commit you to a number.
Replying to good reviews
Do it, keep it short, and mention the specific service. Two reasons: it is polite, and the reply is indexable text that mentions your service and your area on a page Google already trusts.
Do not write four paragraphs. "Thanks Dana — glad the deck came up well. It was properly grey when we started. Enjoy the summer on it." is a better reply than anything longer.
Service pages answer one question
A customer landing on your gutter cleaning page is asking: "will these people do this job, at my house, and roughly what am I in for?"
Most service pages answer a different question — "are we a quality-focused company?" — which nobody asked.
A page that works has:
- What the service is, in one plain sentence.
- What's included and what is not.
- Who it's for — house types, storeys, situations.
- What happens on the day — arrival window, how long, what you need to do.
- What it roughly costs, or honestly why you can't say without seeing it.
- One clear next step.
> [paste business brief]
> [paste rate sheet]
>
> Draft a service page for gutter cleaning. Structure it as: one-sentence description; what's included; what's not included; who it's for; what happens on the day; pricing guidance; next step.
>
> Rules:
> - Plain language. No "premier," "trusted," "quality-focused," or "state-of-the-art."
> - Give real pricing guidance using the rate sheet ranges, and be explicit that final price needs a look.
> - Write "what happens on the day" as though explaining to a nervous first-time customer.
> - Do not invent guarantees, certifications, or years in business.
> - Target roughly 400–500 words.
Getting it onto the site
The page copy is knowledge work — write it in Claude.ai. Putting it on your site is a system change, which is the other tool and the other loop. That is covered in the Tempo lessons.
Resist the temptation to shortcut. The review step on system changes exists precisely so that a page with an invented guarantee on it gets caught before it is public.