Did the change work?

When you change something at your business, log it in Chiffchaff and we'll show you whether your reviews moved. It's on every plan.

Log a change

1. On the dashboard, find Did the change work? and choose Log a change. You can also log one from Analytics.
2. Pick the date it happened, and what changed: a price rise, a new menu, a new hire, new hours, or something else.
3. Add a few words if you like, for example "Coffee up 50 cents". For "Other" this is needed. Only you and your team see it.

You can log a change up to a year back, or up to 60 days ahead if it's planned. Owners and managers can log and remove changes. Up to 10 changes can be logged in 30 days.

What we compare

At 30, 60 and 90 days after the change, we look at the same number of days before it and after it, in your time zone. The day of the change counts as after. For each of those we show:

• Your rating: the average stars before and after, and whether it went up, went down or stayed about the same. A small difference, or one that a couple of unusual reviews could explain, counts as about the same.
• How many reviews came in on each side.
• What customers talked about: what they praised and what could be better, before and after, in Chiffchaff's words. These need at least 3 reviews with comments on each side.

Your Google reviews count, except ones you've marked as ignored.

Too few reviews to tell

If either side has fewer than 5 reviews, we say there are too few to tell rather than guess. With 4 reviews, one 1-star review can pull a 5.0 average down to 4.0, which says more about that one visit than about the change. The 60 and 90 day results have more reviews to go on, so they're often the useful ones. Asking more customers for reviews helps too. See Review requests.

Where results show up

• The dashboard: a result shows on the Did the change work? card for 30 days after it's ready.
• Analytics: Analytics lists every change you've logged with all three results, and the date each one will be ready.
• Your monthly recap: one line for each result that became ready that month. See Your monthly recap.

Results are worked out once, the morning after each mark, and kept. If you log a change with an older date, the results that are already due show up the next morning.

Reading the results

A difference doesn't prove the change caused it. The season, a busy local event or more review requests can move your reviews too. If you logged two changes close together, we say so, because either could be behind a difference.

We never name or quote your reviewers. The themes are written by AI from the reviews' stars and comments, never their names, and anything that repeats a reviewer's words is left out.

Removing a change

In Analytics, choose Remove next to a change. Its results go with it. Your changes and their results are in your data export too. See Export or delete your data.