When is the best time to send a review request?

The completed job is a useful scheduling reference because the customer can now assess the work. For a repair, that may be after the walkthrough; for boarding, after pickup; for prepaid work, after delivery. There is no verified universal response-rate curve showing that each hour of delay costs reviews.

Channel choice depends on permission, customer preference, and reliable contact details. A short text is convenient on a phone; an email allows more context. We do not have a controlled comparison proving that SMS always outperforms email or that email should only be a reminder.

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.

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.

Start with the completion event and the customer’s contact hours. A weekend service can justify a weekend request, but preferences and working patterns vary. Compare similar cohorts before treating a day or hour as better, and do not change several parts of the workflow at once if you want to learn from it.

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.