At the handover
Keys in one hand, phone in the other, relief still fresh.
Review cards · Garages & MOT centres
Ask while the relief is still on their face.
A card handed over with the keys that opens your Google review page in one tap, or one scan of the printed QR. A card per technician, counted separately, so you can see who is asking.
For garages & MOT centres
The strongest review moment in any trade we sell to
On the invoice
A card clipped to the paperwork they are already reading.
Per technician
A card each, counted separately, so you can see who is asking.
No gating
Everyone goes to Google — no sorting the pleased from the rest.
Your customer arrived frightened of the bill
This is what makes a garage different from every other business on this site. A café is asking somebody who enjoyed a coffee. A salon is asking somebody who likes their hair. You are asking somebody who has spent three days assuming it was the gearbox, braced for four figures, and has just been told it was a sensor and it is ninety quid.
That is relief, and relief is a far stronger feeling than satisfaction. It is the best review you will ever get, because they will actually write something — about being told the truth, about not being sold a clutch they did not need, about it being ready when you said. Those are the reviews that win the next customer, because trust is the entire purchase decision when somebody picks a garage.
And it lasts about as long as the walk to the forecourt. Ask at handover, with the keys, before the card machine comes out and they start thinking about money again.
You get two chances a year, so do not waste them
A café sees the same customer forty times a year and can afford to miss most of those moments. You see them at the MOT and perhaps at a service. That is two chances, twelve months apart, and if nobody asks, a whole year passes with nothing added to your listing.
Put the other way round: a garage doing thirty MOTs a week has fifteen hundred genuine review opportunities a year and converts almost none of them, because asking out loud feels like begging and nobody has the words. A card takes the words out of it. It is handed over with the paperwork, it is obvious what it does, and the customer who wants to say something now has somewhere to say it.
A card each, because the customer remembers a person
Nobody writes "the garage was good". They write that Dave explained what was wrong without making them feel stupid. The review is about a person, and if more than one person hands keys back, you want to know which.
Every card carries its own code and is counted separately, so the dashboard does not just say you got fourteen reviews this month — it says which card they came off. That is usually how a garage finds out that one technician asks every single customer and another has never touched it. It is a conversation worth having, and you cannot have it without the numbers.
The waiting room is a second card, not the main one
A counter stand or a display board earns its place in a waiting room, because somebody sitting through an MOT will read anything put in front of them. But it is a weaker moment than handover for an obvious reason: they do not know the outcome yet. Nobody reviews a garage before they have been told what it costs.
So treat it as a second card with its own code, and after a month you will be able to see plainly whether the waiting room earns anything or whether every review you get comes off the one at the desk. That is the sort of thing everybody guesses at and almost nobody measures.
What it costs, and what it does not
A card is £24 once. No monthly fee for the review card, no per-scan charge, and nothing that expires — stop paying us anything and the cards you own keep working, because the profile behind them is free. The same code will also carry the workshop number, your hours and the booking link if you ever want it to, at no extra cost. The rest of the range and its prices are on the pricing page.
The bit that ages well
The card never changes. Where it points does.
This is the difference between a card you own and a card you are stuck with, and it is worth understanding before you buy anybody’s.
A cheap NFC card
The web address is written onto the chip itself. That is why it is cheap, and it works fine — right up until something changes.
- New number? The card still points at the old page.
- To fix it you need every card physically back in your hand.
- Some sellers say “reprogrammable” — that means you re-encode each one yourself with a phone app.
- Lost one? It carries on working for whoever picked it up.
One of ours
The chip carries a permanent code, and we decide what that code opens. The card is a key; the lock is ours to change.
- New number, new role, new company — change it once, in a browser.
- Every card you have ever handed out follows, including the ones you will never see again.
- Point a card at a different profile entirely, whenever you like.
- Lost one? Switch it off from your dashboard and it stops opening anything.
Which is why we can sell you a card and then never charge you again: the thing that keeps it working is not a subscription, it is that the destination was never on the chip. What happens when you change your number goes through all three arrangements in full.
Common questions
When exactly should we hand it over?
At handover, with the keys, before the card machine comes out. That is the peak: they have just found out the bill is smaller than they feared, or that the noise was nothing serious, and they are relieved. Once payment starts they are thinking about money again, and once they are in the car they are gone. The window is about the length of the walk to the forecourt.
Most of our work is MOTs and servicing. Is it worth it on a small job?
More, not less. A garage sees the same customer once or twice a year, so you get a handful of chances annually rather than the weekly ones a café gets. That makes each one worth more, not less — a year of MOTs is fifty or sixty genuine review opportunities, and almost every garage we speak to converts none of them.
Should each technician have a card, or is one on the counter enough?
One on the counter works and is the usual start. A card per technician is better if more than one person hands keys back, because every card carries its own code and is counted separately — so you can see that one person asks thirty times a month and another has never picked it up. They all point at the same Google listing.
Do customers need an app?
No. They tap the card with their phone, or point the camera at the printed QR if their phone has no NFC, and your Google review screen opens in the browser they already have. Nothing to install, no account to make, which matters in a trade where a fair share of customers are not young.
We get a bad review when we quote honestly and somebody goes elsewhere. What then?
Weight is the only real defence. A garage with eleven reviews is one unhappy quote away from a three-star average; a garage with two hundred can absorb it and still read as trustworthy. Asking everybody is what builds that. Asking only the customers you expect to be pleased is not allowed — see below.
Is it against the rules to ask every customer?
Asking everybody is fine. Sending the pleased ones to Google and the unhappy ones to a private feedback form is review gating, which breaches Google’s policies and is exactly what the CMA has been warning UK businesses about. One card, one destination, everybody who comes in.
Can the same card carry our number and opening hours?
Yes, and it costs nothing extra. The code behind a review card is the same code a contact card uses, so it can carry the workshop number, the hours, the address for the satnav and the MOT booking link. Which one it opens is a setting you change from the dashboard, not a different piece of plastic.
What about the waiting room?
A counter stand or a display board earns its place there, because a customer waiting for an MOT has nothing to do and will read anything put in front of them. It is a weaker moment than handover — they do not know the outcome yet — so treat it as a second card rather than the main one, and give it its own code so you can see whether it earns anything.
The moment is different elsewhere — see review cards for trades, where the ask happens on the doorstep, for pubs, where it happens at the bar, and for cafés and restaurants, where a stand on the counter does the asking. The review cards overview covers all of them.
One thing worth knowing before you order, because it is the step people expect to be harder than it is: the card does not have your review page written into it. You paste your Google review link into your dashboard once, and every review card, sticker and stand you own points there from that moment. Change your listing later, or take on a second site, and nothing has to be reprinted.