Pick the moment
The best time to ask for a review is when the customer feels the benefit, which is rarely when the invoice is paid. For a dental clinic it's a few hours after the appointment. For a roofer it's the day after the job, once they've looked at it in daylight. For a coach it's after the session where a client hits a milestone. We trigger the request from that event in GoHighLevel: appointment status set to "completed", job marked "done", or a tag applied by the team.
What we never do is ask on a timer ("30 days after purchase") or ask twice. One request, one gentle follow-up three days later if there was no click, then stop.
The ask
Hi Thomas, it's Emily from BrightSmile. Hope the check-up went smoothly today. How did we do? [Great] [Could be better]Review request, 3 hours after the appointment
Short, from a named person, and it asks a question rather than pushing a link. No discount for a review (it breaks platform rules and everyone can tell), and no "it would really help us" guilt line. People are more generous when they aren't being leaned on.
Route unhappy customers to you first
That two-button question is the whole trick. A "Great" reply gets the Google review link immediately. A "Could be better" reply gets a different message: "Sorry to hear that. What went wrong? Emily will call you today." The contact is tagged, a task is created for the manager, and the review link is never sent.
Yes, as long as you don't suppress reviews or pay for them. Asking how someone's experience was and offering to fix a problem is customer service. Only sending the review link to people who said they were happy is a choice about who you ask, not a filter on what they say once they get there.
In practice about one in ten replies is "Could be better", and most of those become a saved customer rather than a public one-star.
Replying to reviews, automatically drafted
Every review deserves a reply, and nobody has time to write them. We connect the review feed into GoHighLevel and have a workflow draft a reply in the owner's voice: thank the person by first name, mention the specific thing they praised, keep it to two sentences. The draft lands as a task. A human reads it, edits if needed, and posts it. Replies go out within a day instead of never.
What good looks like
A busy local business running this properly sees a steady trickle: a handful of new reviews each week, almost all four or five stars, and a rating that climbs a few tenths over a quarter. The dental practice that inspired our no-show article went from 4.2 to 4.7 in five months without asking anyone twice. The flood you see promised in ads doesn't happen, and if it did, the platforms would flag it. Slow and consistent is the point.
Key takeaways
- Ask within a few hours of the moment the customer is happiest, not on a schedule.
- One short message, from a named person, with one link. No begging, no incentives.
- A quick "how did we do?" step before the link routes unhappy customers to a human instead of to Google.
- Draft review replies automatically, but have a person send them.
- Expect a steady trickle, not a flood: a few new reviews a week from a busy local business is a healthy result.