None of the 20 barbershops we read had answered any of their recent reviews. Not one. The three most-reviewed barbershop listings in that set hold 816, 490 and 440 Google reviews, and the median across the 20 we read is 137. Those review counts are whole listings; the reply counts we take are drawn from each business's most recent reviews. So there is a lot of customer writing sitting under those listings with nothing written back under the recent end of it.
Hair salons look different in the part of them we can see. Parlour 9 Salon & Spa answered 10 of its last 10 and carries 324 reviews. Fantastic Sams Cut & Color answered 9 of its last 10 and carries 594. Pearl Light answered 8 of its last 10, with 213. Those are the three answering the most out of the 20 hair salons we read, which means they are the only three whose reply behaviour we can describe at all. The median review count for that trade is 112.
Nail salons carry the highest median review count of the three trades on this page: 252, against 137 for barbershops and 112 for hair salons. The three biggest listings hold 1063, 713 and 681 reviews. Nail Bar and Spa answered 10 of its last 10 and carries 1063 reviews. DK NAILS answered 10 of its last 10, with 500.
The median ratings are 4.9 for barbershops, 4.8 for hair salons and 4.65 for nail salons. A median is one figure for a whole trade; it does not tell you which listing is which, and nothing on this page is ordered by stars. What it is ordered by is replies. We measured 58 of the businesses someone searching in Lakeville is shown; a typical one answered 77% of its recent reviews. That set is a catchment, not a register of what sits inside the city limits, and this group accounts for 60 of the 460 businesses we read here.
What to do about it
If you cut hair around Lakeville, the number that matters to you is not your star rating. It is that we read 20 barbershops and none of them had answered any of their recent reviews, while listings in that trade hold as many as 816 reviews. Depth without replies is the whole opening.
Start at the recent end, not the bottom of the file. A listing with hundreds of reviews cannot be worked through from the beginning, and the recent ones are where our counts come from. Answer the good ones as well as the difficult ones; a reply under a five-star review is the one a reader has no reason to discount. Write each one in your own words, naming the thing the customer actually mentioned, because the same three sentences repeated down a page stops reading like a person. Then treat it as something that recurs rather than something you clear once. Replies that stop after the backlog read as a one-off; replies that keep arriving read as an owner who is present.
Barbershops
We read 20 barbershops businesses here and not one had answered a single one of its ten most recent reviews. The first owner here who replies is the only one doing it.
Hair salons
| # | Business | Answered | Reviews | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Parlour 9 Salon & Spa | 10 of 10 | 324 | 4.9 |
| 2 | Fantastic Sams Cut & Color | 9 of 10 | 594 | 4.7 |
| 3 | Pearl Light | 8 of 10 | 213 | 4.8 |
Nail salons
| # | Business | Answered | Reviews | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nail Bar and Spa | 10 of 10 | 1063 | 4.3 |
| 2 | DK NAILS | 10 of 10 | 500 | 4.9 |
| 3 | Lumi Nails Lounge Apple Valley | 3 of 10 | 608 | 4.2 |