Growing the business
A review is not a compliment. It is evidence
Nobody reads reviews to find out if you are nice. They read them to find out whether a stranger like them regretted it.
There is a reason the first thing most people do with a recommendation is go and check it. A friend saying "they are good" is an opinion. Thirty people they have never met saying the same thing is something closer to a fact.
That is the job a review does, and it is not a flattering one: it exists because strangers do not trust you yet, and it is the cheapest way to fix that.
The count does more work than the score
Five stars from three people is weaker than four and a half from ninety. Everybody knows — without being able to explain it — that a small number of perfect reviews can be arranged, and that ninety cannot. Volume is the credibility; the score only has to be good enough.
Almost everyone would. Almost nobody is asked
Happy customers do not leave reviews, because they are not thinking about you five minutes after they leave — they are thinking about parking. Most people, asked directly and at the right moment, will say yes without resenting it.
The right moment is the same day, while it still feels like something that happened, and the right ask is one short message with a link in it. Ask a week later and you are interrupting a stranger about a haircut.
The bad one is not the disaster
A page with nothing but perfect scores reads as suspicious, and most people instinctively go and find the worst review to see what it says. What they are looking for is not whether something went wrong — things go wrong everywhere — but whether the business behaved well afterwards.
A calm, specific, non-defensive reply to a bad review sells more than the five-star ones above it. It is the only place on the internet a prospective customer gets to see how you handle a problem.
Put them where the decision is made
Reviews sitting on a platform the visitor never opens are doing half their job. On your own page, next to the service and the price, they are answering the exact question being asked at the exact second it is asked.
What changes
Strangers stop being strangers before they ever speak to you, and the gap between hearing your name and booking you gets shorter. You are not asking people to say nice things. You are collecting the evidence you already earned.