How to Set Up Automated Review Requests After Every Job

Local-services businesses live and die by reviews. A roofer with 412 five-star Google reviews shows up in the map pack. The one with 38 reviews does not. The gap between those two outcomes is measured in millions of dollars of lifetime revenue, and almost everyone reading this knows that already.

What is less obvious is that the difference between businesses with 412 reviews and 38 reviews is rarely talent, work quality, or budget. It is timing. The 412-review company has a system. The 38-review company has the owner's assistant occasionally remembering to text Mrs. Patterson on a Tuesday.

This post is the system. Specifically, how to fire a review request automatically inside the 24-48 hour window after a successful job (when customers are statistically most willing to share a positive experience), how to route happy and unhappy customers without violating Google's review-gating policy, and how to wire the whole thing in Deelo using Field Service, SMS, Forms, and Automation.

Three things are true about review requests, and you have to internalize all three.

First: people will leave a positive review if you ask, but they will not initiate one on their own. The base rate of unprompted positive reviews from happy customers is somewhere around 1-3% in most local-service categories. The rate from prompted requests in the right window is 15-30%, sometimes higher for residential services where the customer feels personally helped.

Second: the window matters more than the message. A request sent four hours after the job is finished hits a different brain than one sent four days later. Inside 48 hours, the customer still remembers the tech's name, the specific problem you solved, and the feeling of relief when the leak stopped or the AC kicked on. After 48 hours, the experience has compressed into "the plumber came on Tuesday." Reviews written in the second state are bland and short. Reviews written in the first state are vivid and long, which is exactly what Google's algorithm rewards in local rankings.

Third: manual asks fall through. Even the most disciplined office manager will, over the course of 200 jobs a month, forget some, send some twice, and skip the ones that feel awkward. Automation does not get tired. Automation also runs at 6 PM on a Saturday when nobody is in the office to remember.

If you take only one tactical thing from this post, take this: send review requests by SMS, not email. The response rates I have seen across actual field service operations land roughly five times higher for SMS than for the same request sent by email. Open rates on personal SMS run 95%+ within the first three minutes. Email opens, even from the customer who just hired you, hover around 30-40% over the first 24 hours.

The psychology is straightforward. An email arrives in a queue. SMS arrives in a conversation. The customer who got their water heater fixed an hour ago is still in the headspace of that conversation. A text from your number reads as a continuation of it. An email from your domain reads as marketing.

There are two practical caveats. One: you need explicit SMS consent. Field Service should be capturing this at the time of booking, ideally with a checkbox on the intake form that reads "Okay to text you with job updates and service follow-ups" — that consent covers the review request. Two: you need the customer's mobile number, which is not always what they gave you. Office numbers will fail silently. Build a fallback to email if the SMS bounces.

The single best review-request SMS I have seen is 18 words long. It reads: "Hey {{firstName}}, this is {{tech}} from {{company}}. Glad I could help with the {{shortJobDesc}} today. Mind sharing how it went? {{shortLink}}"

Four things this does right. It identifies the tech by name (the customer remembers a person, not a company). It references the specific job (signals real attention, not a mass send). It uses "mind sharing how it went" instead of "please leave us a 5-star review" (the second is what bots and lazy operators send, and customers see straight through it). And the link is short — bit.ly, Deelo's built-in link shortener, or your own — because long URLs in SMS get cut off and look suspicious.

Do not include emoji. Do not include marketing language. Do not include the words "Google" or "five-star" in the request itself — that is review-gating-adjacent and the gateway to violations. Keep it conversational and short. The customer's response is supposed to be "sure, here you go," not "this feels like a chore."

This is the section where you have to be careful. Many review-automation platforms market a feature called "review gating," which works like this: ask the customer how their experience was. If they say positive, route them to Google or Yelp. If they say negative, route them to a private feedback form that never becomes a public review. Google explicitly prohibits this. Yelp's terms are similarly hostile.

The official Google policy: "Don't discourage or prohibit negative reviews or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers." Selectively routing negative-leaning customers away from the review form is exactly what that sentence prohibits, and Google has gotten more aggressive about enforcement, including removing entire review profiles from businesses caught doing it.

Here is the line that you can stay on the right side of without giving up the value of sentiment routing.

You cannot ask "how was your experience" and then filter sentiment, hiding the negative responses from the public review form. That is gating.

You can ask "how was your experience" as a first message, treat the response as private operational feedback, and then in your follow-up send a public review request to every customer regardless of how they answered. The negative-leaning customer still gets the Google link. The difference is that you, the operator, have heard the complaint first, and have a chance to fix it before they decide whether to write a review at all. That is not gating. That is good customer service.

The practical implementation: send the initial "how did it go" message. If positive (4-5 stars), follow up immediately with the public review request. If negative (1-3 stars), follow up with a personal call or email from the owner within four business hours, ideally before the customer has a chance to write the public review. Then, 48 hours later, send the public review request to that same customer too. If you have actually resolved the complaint, many of those customers will write a positive review or none at all. The ones who still write a negative review were going to write one anyway, and your reputation is better off for having heard it first.

The workflow has three stages: the initial sentiment ask, the branched follow-up, and the public review request that runs for every customer regardless of branch.

Open the Automation app, create a workflow named "Review Request Sequence." Trigger: `field_service.job.completed`. Add a 90-minute delay (the sweet spot — long enough that the tech has actually left, short enough to be in the recall window).

Action: `sms.send` with a template that contains a sentiment-rating link. The SMS reads: "Hey {{firstName}}, this is {{owner}} from {{company}}. Quick question — how did {{tech}} do today on the {{jobShortDesc}}? Tap to rate: {{ratingLink}}". The link points to a Deelo Forms form with a 1-5 star rating widget, prefilled with the `jobId` and `customerId` in the URL.

When the customer submits the form, the form's `forms.submission.created` event triggers the next stage.

Use a conditional split on the `rating` value. If `rating >= 4`, route to the public review SMS. If `rating <= 3`, route to a private resolution flow.

The public review SMS reads: "Awesome, thanks {{firstName}}. If you have 30 seconds, would you mind sharing that on Google? It helps a lot. {{googleReviewLink}}". The Google review link should be your direct review-form link (you can get this from your Google Business Profile, format `https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid={{placeId}}`).

The private resolution flow: create a CRM task for the owner or office manager titled "Resolve concern — {{customerName}} rated {{rating}}/5 on {{jobDescription}}", with due-in-four-hours. Send the customer a follow-up SMS: "{{firstName}}, thanks for the honest feedback. {{owner}} will be in touch shortly to make this right." This is the email/call the owner makes within four business hours.

Forty-eight hours after the initial sentiment SMS, regardless of how the customer rated, send the public review SMS. This is the step that keeps you on the right side of Google's policy — every customer who got the initial ask also gets the public link.

For customers who already left a 4-5 rating, this is a friendly reminder if they did not act on the first prompt. For customers who initially rated low, this is the policy-compliant follow-through. If the owner has resolved their concern in the meantime, many of those customers will respond positively. The ones who still post negative reviews represent honest signal you would have gotten anyway, plus the operational benefit that you had a chance to fix the underlying issue.

Set the workflow to suppress this final send if the customer responds STOP at any point (Deelo's SMS app handles STOP/HELP compliance automatically) or if they have explicitly tagged `do-not-request-review` in CRM.

The three numbers to watch in the first 30 days.

Response rate on the initial sentiment SMS. Healthy is 35-50%. If you are below 25%, the SMS copy is too marketing-flavored or you are sending it too late.

Review conversion on the public ask. Of customers who got the Google review SMS, what percentage actually left a review? In residential field service, healthy is 15-25%. In B2B services, expect 8-15%.

Monthly review velocity on Google Business Profile. Before automation, most local-services businesses are picking up 2-5 reviews a month organically. With the workflow running, expect 15-40 a month depending on your job volume. Inside 90 days, the cumulative effect on map-pack rankings becomes visible.

The reason this works is not because the workflow is clever. It is because the workflow runs every single time, on time, even when the office is closed. The 412-review company is not better at customer service than the 38-review company. They just remembered to ask.