Most review requests fail because of when they are sent

The problem is almost never the words

Owners rewrite the review request over and over, trying to find a phrasing that does not feel like begging. The phrasing is not why it failed. Timing is.

A customer's willingness to write about you has a short half-life. It peaks at the moment the problem is gone and they are relieved, and it decays fast. Two days later they are grateful in principle and busy in practice. A week later the job is a thing that happened.

The window is the same day, after you leave

Not while you are still there, because asking to your customer's face puts them in an awkward position and produces a yes that never happens. Not the next morning, because the moment has cooled. The same day, a couple of hours after the van pulls away, when the hot water is working and they have noticed it working.

That is a narrow window and it is why this almost never gets done manually. The gap between finishing a job and being free to think about admin is usually the gap between the good moment and a worse one.

Three ways the window gets missed

Every owner misses it the same three ways, and each has a straightforward fix.

• Batching. Sitting down on Friday to ask everyone from that week means four of the five requests are already late. Ask per job, not per week.
• Asking the wrong person. On a job booked by one person and paid by another, the request often goes to whoever is on the invoice. Send it to whoever you actually dealt with on site.
• Making them work for it. A message saying please leave us a review on Google is an instruction to go and find something. A message with the direct link is a single tap. That difference alone accounts for most of the gap between asking and receiving.

What the message should actually contain

Short, specific, one link, no pitch. Name the job, not the transaction: thanks for having us out to the boiler today is a sentence a human wrote. Thank you for your custom is a sentence a system wrote.

One link, going straight to the review form, not to your profile. And no second ask attached. A message that requests a review and mentions your maintenance plan gets neither.

Send it as a text rather than an email. An email asking for a review arrives in the same place as every other piece of admin the person is avoiding, and it competes with all of it. A text arrives on the device they would write the review on, which removes a step nobody thinks about until they watch somebody try to do it.

Do not tell them what to say. Suggestions of what to mention read as a script, and a review that reads as a script does you less good than a short honest one. The people who write the most useful reviews are the ones who were left alone to write them.

Do not chase the ones who go quiet

One reminder a few days later is fine. Two is a nuisance and the person who found it a nuisance is the person you have handed a reason to write something you did not want.

The maths already works without pushing. If you ask every customer, on the day, with a link, a steady share of them will do it. Not asking is what leaves the pipe empty, and no amount of chasing the ones who declined fixes that.

Why it compounds

Reviews are the first thing the next customer reads about you, and they are read as much for their recency as their content. Twelve reviews with the newest from last week reads as a business currently working. Forty reviews with the newest from two years ago reads as a business that used to.

That is the real argument for asking every time rather than in bursts. A steady trickle keeps the top of the list current, and the top of the list is the part anybody actually reads.