How to Get Your Staff Collecting Testimonials for You
Do not appoint someone to “handle testimonials”. Give the ask to whoever did the work:
Each stylist asks her own customer, at her own mirror, from her own phone. Not the owner walking the floor. Not the receptionist at the till. Not one person collecting for everybody.
The ask works because it happens between two people who spent forty minutes together and like each other. Hand it to a third party and you have removed the only thing that was making it comfortable — and you have turned a warm moment into an approach from a stranger with a phone.
A salon with four stylists does not need one person collecting eight testimonials a week. It needs four people collecting two.
Why centralising it kills it
Put one person in charge and watch what happens over a month.
They have to interrupt a colleague’s customer, at the end of a service they had nothing to do with, and ask for something. The customer does not know them. The stylist does not love being interrupted. The ask arrives with no relationship behind it, so it needs explaining, which makes it bigger, which makes it easier to refuse.
And the moment it is someone’s job, it becomes a task on a list rather than part of the service. Tasks compete with running the shop, and running the shop wins. On a Saturday, the testimonial-collector is cutting hair like everybody else, and the collecting stops — permanently, and nobody notices which week it happened.
The ask has to live inside the service, performed by the person performing the service. There is no other configuration that survives a busy month.
What each person actually needs
Not a training session. Four things, and they fit on a card by the mirror:
- The sentence. “Can I ask you a favour? Thirty seconds — say what you think.” Then stop talking and hold out the phone.
- The moment. At the mirror, before the till. Not after payment, which turns it into an add-on.
- The permission to be refused. “Of course, no problem”, and carry on. That is the whole recovery.
- The rule about words. Never tell the customer what to say. If they freeze, ask them a question — “what did you come in for?” — and let them answer it.
That is the entire brief. Anything longer and it becomes a policy, and people do not follow policies at 18:30 on a Friday.
The thing you must never do: set them a target
This is where owners break it, and they break it with good intentions.
“Everyone gets three a week.” Now it is a number, and numbers get chased. On Friday, a stylist who has one will start asking customers she would not otherwise have asked — the one who seemed fine but not delighted, the one in a rush — because she is behind and she does not want to be the one who missed.
Every one of those produces a lukewarm, obliging recording that should never be published.
Worse, it breaks the mechanism that was protecting you. The whole reason your testimonials are trustworthy is that the customer who is not genuinely happy simply does not record: she says she is in a hurry, she smiles, she goes, and the bad testimonial is never made — not moderated, not deleted, never made. That filter only functions while the no is free and the stylist is genuinely fine with it. Attach a quota and you have introduced a reason to press, and pressing manufactures exactly the testimonial the filter would have caught.
Ask instead: “did you ask everybody who was clearly happy this week?” If the answer is yes and she got one, that was a one-testimonial week, and she did nothing wrong.
Give them credit, not a KPI
If you want to motivate it, motivate the right thing.
Let each stylist’s testimonials be visibly hers. The customer she made happy, in her chair, saying her name. That is not a metric on a wall; it is a stylist watching a video of her own customer being delighted with her own work, published where her friends can see it.
That is a fundamentally different incentive from “three a week”, and it points in a better direction: it rewards making customers happy, not extracting recordings from them.
The owner’s job here is to ask the one question that keeps it alive — “anyone get a good one this week?” — and then to actually watch the video when someone says yes.
The stylist who does not want to
Some will hate it. Camera-shy, awkward about asking, convinced their customers will find it strange.
Do not force it, for exactly the reason you do not force customers. A stylist who is uncomfortable asking will transmit that discomfort straight into the request — hesitant, over-explained, apologetic — and the customer will pick it up and say no. You will both conclude the idea does not work, and you will both be wrong.
Start with the one who is already the most comfortable. Let her collect two a week for a fortnight, and let the others watch what happens when a customer’s video goes out with her name on it. It spreads much better sideways than downwards.
A quiet Tuesday, one chair
Picture a two-chair salon on a slow Tuesday. Imagine a stylist — call her Nadia — who has just finished a cut and colour for a woman who walked in flat and is now turning her head at the mirror, pleased. That turn of the head is the moment. Nadia does not fetch the owner or wait for the till, where the customer would cool off. She catches her while she is still looking. “Can I ask you a favour? Thirty seconds — say what you think.” She holds out her phone and stops talking.
The customer laughs — “oh, I’m terrible on camera” — then says it anyway: “I came in not knowing what I wanted and she just got it.” Fifteen words, one nervous laugh, done. That laugh is not a flaw to trim out later; it is the proof it is real, and a shy customer’s hesitation beats a polished line. Swap Nadia for the owner walking over from the till and the warmth is gone — that is the whole case for a team testimonial collection built on the person who did the work.
Whose phone, whose account?
Here is the fair objection. If four people record on four phones, someone still has to turn the clips into posts. Have you just moved the bottleneck?
No — because you have split the part that needs a relationship from the part that does not. The ask needs Nadia; only she has the forty minutes behind her. The publishing needs nobody in particular: a clip lands, a caption gets written once, it goes out with her name on it. And the caption is yours to write — the customer’s words are hers and stay untouched, exactly as she said them. Keep the two jobs apart and publishing never quietly becomes one person “handling testimonials” again.
What happens when a stylist leaves
Staff move on. Nadia collects lovely testimonials for a year, then leaves for a salon across town — do her testimonials go with her?
They stay. The video was recorded in your chair, about a service your salon gave, and the consent the customer gave was to publish it for the salon, not for Nadia. What you lose is the person who was good at asking — which is the real reason not to let her be the only one.
One stylist, one mirror, this week
Do not roll it out. Pick the person most likely to enjoy it, give her the four things on the card, and leave her alone for two weeks.
If it works for her, it will work for the others, and they will have seen it work before you ask them to try — which is a much easier conversation than the one you were about to have at a staff meeting.
The routine that makes it survive a busy Saturday is the same for a team as for one person: attach the ask to the mirror, not to a target.