Reviews, Response Time and Repeat Work: What the Numbers Say for a Local Truck Business

Updated September 2026

Customer-experience statistics are the least reliable kind: most were produced by a company selling the cure. This guide uses them anyway, because for a local junk removal, roll-off or moving company the reviews page is the storefront — but it says who produced each number, and it names the ones that fall apart when you look for the study.

Reviews decide who gets the call

BrightLocal surveys about a thousand US adults every year about how they choose local businesses. (BrightLocal sells review-management software; this is a vendor’s survey, of 1,002 people, self-reported.) Its 2026 edition found:

97% read reviews for local businesses, and 41% say they always do.
About two-thirds will only use a business rated 4 stars or higher; roughly three in ten want 4.5.
74% look for reviews written in the last three months. A five-star rating from 2022 is not doing the work you think it is.
89% expect the owner to respond to reviews. 50% are put off by copy-and-paste replies.

An older, independent check: the Pew Research Center found in 2016 that 82% of US adults at least sometimes read online reviews before buying something for the first time. It is a decade old and about products, but it is not a vendor’s number, and it points the same way.

Asking works — and there is now a federal rule about how

In the same BrightLocal survey, 78% of consumers said a business had asked them for a review in the past year, and 83% of those who were asked left one. Self-reported numbers like that overstate what you will see — but the direction is dependable: most crews never ask, and most customers who are asked, do it.

The best moment is the one where the customer is looking at an empty garage or a finished job. That is a text message sent when the job is marked done, not an email next week.

Know the rule. The FTC’s Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule took effect on October 21, 2024. You may ask for reviews and you may offer an incentive — but you may not make the incentive depend on the review being positive, reviews by insiders (you, your family, your employees) need a clear disclosure, and fake reviews can bring civil penalties.

Speed: the first to call back gets the conversation

The study everyone half-remembers is "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" (Harvard Business Review, 2011). It was really two studies:

An audit of 2,241 US companies using a test web inquiry: 37% responded within an hour, 24% took more than a day, and 23% never responded at all.
An analysis of 1.25 million sales leads: companies that tried to reach a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a real conversation with a decision-maker as those that waited one more hour — and more than 60 times as likely as those that waited a day.

Read it carefully: that is about getting the conversation, not winning the sale; the leads were web inquiries to larger companies around 2010; and one author ran a company that sold lead-response software. The "respond within five minutes or lose 100x" line you may have seen is not in this article.

For a hauler the application is simple. Someone who needs a garage cleared has three tabs open. The quote request that arrives while you are on a job and is answered at 7 PM has usually been answered by someone else at 2.

For movers: the complaints people make

About one American in nine moves in a year: the Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey found 11.8% of people lived somewhere different from a year earlier — 8.9% had moved within the same state, 2.1% to another state.

The Better Business Bureau reported that in 2024 people made more than 100,000 inquiries about movers on BBB.org and filed 718 complaints; victims who reported a moving scam to its Scam Tracker lost a median of $754.

FMCSA regulates more than 5,000 interstate household-goods carriers and brokers. Its 2023 enforcement sweep ran more than 100 investigations in 16 states, prompted — in the agency’s words — by a significant rise in complaints of movers holding goods hostage; it reported finding more than 1,000 violations. It ran the sweep again in 2024 across 17 states.

A hundred thousand people looked a mover up before hiring one. The honest mover’s advantage is whatever that search shows: the crew that turned up when it said it would, the photos, the reply to the one bad review.

(We left out the annual FMCSA complaint totals that appear in many articles. We could not open a government page that states them.)

Your market is bigger than it looks

The EPA’s most recent figures (for 2018 — still its latest year) put US construction and demolition debris at 600 million tons, more than twice all municipal solid waste (292.4 million tons, about 4.9 pounds per person per day). Most C&D tonnage is concrete and asphalt from roads and bridges rather than house cleanouts, so don’t read it as your addressable market — read it as a reason the work is not going away.

The crew is part of the customer experience

Bureau of Labor Statistics data for 2024: refuse and recyclable material collectors died on the job at a rate of 37.4 per 100,000 full-time workers, and truck drivers at 25.7 — against 3.3 for all workers. That occupation code is municipal and commercial trash collection, the closest published match to a junk crew rather than an exact one. It is here because a crew that gets hurt does not turn up on time tomorrow — and because the things that protect them (a truck that was checked this morning, a day that isn’t rushed) are the same things the customer notices.

Three statistics to stop repeating

"A 5% increase in retention raises profits 25–95%." The Bain document usually behind this says that in financial services, a 5% increase in retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit — one industry, a consultancy’s illustration, no method shown. The wider range is a modelled lifetime-value example from large firms in the 1980s and ’90s. It is not a measurement, and certainly not of a five-truck hauler.

"It costs five times more to win a customer than to keep one." The 2014 Harvard Business Review article that people cite says "five to 25 times" and gives no source. We found no study behind it.

"62% of calls to small businesses go unanswered." A marketing company monitored 85 of its own clients for 30 days in 2016. That is the whole study.

The thing all three are reaching for is true and needs no percentage: repeat customers and referrals are the cheapest work you will ever get, and you get them by showing up when you said, answering the phone, and asking for the review.

RelayPoint, in your trade’s words: Movers · Junk removal & hauling · Roll-off & dumpsters · Landscaping & tree service · Portable sanitation & septic

Sources

This is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice, and RelayPoint is not a law firm, an accountant or a compliance consultant. The figures are other organisations’ published findings, read in September 2026 at the addresses listed under Sources; they describe the businesses those organisations studied, not yours, and none of them is a result of using RelayPoint.