The short answer
Send the review request the same day the job is finished and paid — within a few hours is the sweet spot, and the same evening still beats next week many times over. Keep sends inside normal waking hours, and follow up once a few days later if there is no response. Fresh gratitude is the whole game: every day of delay costs you reviews.
Freshness beats everything else
Gratitude has a half-life measured in hours. Right after the job, the customer is still feeling the fixed leak, the cool house, the cleared yard — and a review request lands as a natural part of the visit. By next week the moment has closed: same customer, same good work, a fraction of the response. A request the evening after the job converts several times better than one sent the following week.
Channel amplifies timing. Texts get opened within minutes, which is why review-request texts convert several times better than email — and around a third of customers asked by text shortly after the job leave a review. Email earns its keep later, as the polite follow-up.
A schedule that works for most service businesses
Anchor to the completed payment, not the appointment. Payment is the unambiguous end of the job — the work passed inspection and the customer signed off with their wallet. An hour or three after payment, or that evening, is late enough that the visit has wrapped and soon enough that the goodwill is intact.
Do not send while your tech is still in the driveway. A request that arrives mid-goodbye feels automated in the worst way. Even a thirty- to sixty-minute delay puts a beat between the human interaction and the message.
Then one follow-up, two to four days later, only if the customer has not acted — that catches the people who meant to and got busy, which is most non-responders. After that, stop. Later payments from a repeat customer should wait out a cooldown rather than restart the asking.
Times to avoid
Keep requests inside normal waking hours — roughly 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. local time is a safe window. A text at 6 a.m. or 11 p.m. wakes someone up, reads as spam, and burns the goodwill the request depends on. If a payment settles at midnight, hold the message until morning; those few hours cost far less than a bad first impression.
Do not overthink the calendar. Advice about the perfect weekday or the magic mid-morning slot misses the point for service businesses: the best time is anchored to the job's own clock, not the calendar's. A Saturday request an hour after a Saturday job beats a perfectly scheduled Tuesday send by days of decay.
How ReviewNudger handles the clock
ReviewNudger sends one neutral review request by text or email after each completed payment, with a delay you choose and follow-ups you configure. Quiet hours are built in: set your window once, and any send that would land outside it is rescheduled to the next allowed time — a midnight invoice becomes a morning text without anyone thinking about it.
A repeat-customer cooldown keeps later payments from restarting the asks, and STOP replies are honored automatically. The point of automating the timing is that the best moment usually arrives while you are already driving to the next job — the system asks at the right hour so nobody has to remember. It is $29 a month flat with a 14-day free trial, and you can text the example to your own phone first.
Frequently asked questions
Is it too soon to ask before the customer has lived with the work?
For most services, no — the result is obvious immediately, and the review describes the experience, not a durability test. For long projects, ask at the final walkthrough and payment, the natural finish line. If a rare callback changes the story, the customer can always edit their review.
What about weekends?
Send them. If the job finished Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening is the best time that will ever exist for that request. Daytime and evening hours matter; for home and local services, the day of the week mostly does not.
When should the follow-up go out?
Two to four days after the first request, inside the same waking-hours window, and email is the politer channel for it. One follow-up roughly doubles conversion; more than one mostly generates opt-outs.
Does the delay need to be exact?
No. Anything from about an hour after payment to that evening works well. What costs you is days — every day of delay lets the gratitude fade, until you are asking a stranger for a favor instead of a happy customer for a minute.