04 · After every job
The Google review engine
People who are happy with the work rarely think to say so in public. The ones who post without being asked are usually the ones with a complaint. The Google review engine evens that out: after every finished job, your customer gets one text asking how it went, while the work is still fresh in their head.
Every customer gets the identical message: the happy ones, the quiet ones, and the ones you’d rather not hear from. Filtering people first and only showing the Google link to the ones who liked you is called review gating, and it’s against Google’s rules and the FTC’s. So the same text carries both doors: reply here if something was off, or leave a review if it wasn’t.
If someone replies with a problem, it lands in your inbox where you can still fix it, usually before it ever becomes a review. If a bad one posts anyway, you get an alert so you can respond publicly while it counts. A complaint the owner answered reads very differently to the next customer than one left sitting there. Your part is doing the job. The ask goes out on its own.