Getting reviews: the timing, the ask, and the rules

The timing

Best: at completion, in person. Highest conversion by a distance.

Second: a text within the hour, with the link. Automatable, and nearly as good.

Distant third: a follow-up the next day. Works, less well.

Do not: a week later. By then it is a favour rather than a reaction, and the specific details that make a review persuasive have already faded.

For recurring customers, ask after the second or third visit rather than the first. They have more to say and their review reads as a relationship rather than a single transaction.

What makes a review useful to the next customer

Reviews persuade through specificity. "Great service" persuades nobody. "Booked Tuesday, turned up at 8 on the dot, took four hours on a very neglected SUV, sent photos before and after, price was exactly what was quoted" does the whole job.

So the ask should point at specifics: what you did, that the price matched the quote, that you turned up when you said. These are the three anxieties every prospective customer of a mobile service has, and a review that addresses them is worth ten that say "brilliant."

What you may not do

Pay for reviews. Including "review swaps" with other businesses.

Offer a discount, a free add-on or entry to a draw in exchange. Incentivising reviews at all is prohibited by platforms, and incentivising only positive ones is a further problem.

Gate them. Sending everyone to a private feedback form and only forwarding the happy ones to Google is precisely the practice regulators have acted on.

Write them, or have friends and family write them. Fabricated reviews are the clearest case in the FTC rule.

Ask employees to review without disclosure. If you ever have a second pair of hands, the relationship has to be disclosed.

The safe version is simple: ask everyone, the same way, every time, and incentivise nobody.

Answering a bad one

Reply once. Briefly. Factually. Publicly. Then take it private.

The audience is not the reviewer. It is the next person reading, who is deciding whether they want to deal with you when something goes wrong. A calm, specific, non-defensive reply is more persuasive than the complaint is damaging.

What to avoid: arguing details, implying the customer is lying, mentioning anything private about them, or writing a paragraph. Nobody has ever won a public argument with a customer, and the attempt is what turns one bad review into a reason not to book.

If a review breaks a platform's policy — abusive, off-topic, obviously not a customer — report it and move on. If it is simply unfair, reply once and let it stand. A profile with one bad review handled well reads as real, and a profile with only perfect reviews reads as suspicious.

Making it routine

The only thing that produces a steady stream is a routine that fires on every completed job, not on the ones you remember. That is why it belongs in the job flow rather than in your intentions.

When a customer does not pay. · Before-and-after photos that protect you. · Getting your first clients without paid ads.

What Rigsheet does

Marking a job complete prompts the review request, with your own review link, sent as a text from your business number, at the moment with the highest conversion rate there is.

Automated review requests are on the Solo tier ($29/mo) rather than the cheapest one, because they send SMS and SMS has a real per-message and per-number cost. The rest of the job flow that makes the ask possible — completion, photos, invoicing — starts lower. What each plan includes.

Questions and answers