Review request generator

The Ten Per Cent Off That Costs You the Review

A salon puts a card on the desk offering ten per cent off your next visit for a Google review. It feels generous, it works, and the reviews it produces can be removed, because a review bought with a discount is not a review as far as Google is concerned. The note beside the message the review request generator above writes says it in one line: never offer anything in return for a review.

Which leaves you with the harder version, and the only one that lasts. You have to ask, in a way that does not feel like a chore, at a moment when the person is still glad they came.

What the Review Request Generator Writes

A short WhatsApp message with the customer’s name in it, one sentence explaining why the review helps, your link, and a thank you. That is the whole shape and it is deliberately unremarkable.

Nothing is generated on the fly. The messages are written in advance, eight trades multiplied by three tones, plus a set of alternates you can step through with the button under the bubble. You are picking from a library rather than commissioning a machine, which is why the message is complete and readable before any script runs on the page.

What you get back is on your clipboard, and everything else is up to you.

Three Fields and Two Choices

Five controls, and one of them is the whole point.

• Business name. Appears in the sentence about who is asking.
• Industry. Eight trades, which decides which of the written messages you get.
• Tone. Warm, professional or playful.
• Customer first name. The greeting. A message that opens with a name reads as a message; one that does not reads as a mailshot.
• Google review link. The one that matters, and the one people get wrong.

Leave any of them blank and the message still reads properly, because each field falls back to the words sitting in it as a placeholder. That is useful while you are choosing a tone and dangerous if you copy the result without looking, because the link falls back to the phrase your review link rather than to anything a customer can tap.

Getting the Link Right

The hint under the field is the instruction: in your Business Profile, choose Ask for reviews, and copy the short link.

That link is not the same as the link to your listing, and the difference decides whether anybody actually leaves a review. A listing link drops somebody on your business page, where they have to find the reviews section, scroll, and work out where to write. The ask link opens the box. On a phone, in a chat, that gap is most of your conversion.

Two things worth doing once. Tap your own link on a phone that is not signed in as you, so you see what a customer sees. And save it somewhere you can find it in four seconds, because you are going to paste it hundreds of times and the version of you looking for it in a busy salon will not go hunting.

Send It the Day After

The note under the message is titled send it the day after, and the timing is doing more work than the wording.

Too soon and you are asking while somebody is still paying, which turns a favour into a transaction and puts them on the spot in front of you. Too late and the visit has gone; a message a fortnight after a haircut is asking somebody to remember how they felt about something they have stopped thinking about.

The day after is when the thing is still true and the pressure is gone. They are somewhere else, they have their phone, and they can do it in the thirty seconds the message promises.

The one exception is work with a delay in it. A physio course, a piece of building work, anything where the result arrives later than the appointment does. Ask when the customer knows whether it worked, not when you finished doing it.

Ask Once

The second half of the note is to ask once, and it is the rule most likely to be broken by accident rather than on purpose.

Nobody sets out to nag. What happens is that the ask lives in somebody’s head, the same regular comes in every six weeks, and by the third visit they have been asked three times. From your side it is one message a quarter. From theirs it is a business that keeps asking for a favour they have already declined.

The version that works is a list of who has been asked, kept somewhere other than memory. If you are doing this by hand, that is a column in a spreadsheet and it is worth the two minutes.

Who to Ask, and Where That Goes Wrong

The note says to ask the customers who were happy, which is sensible and also the sentence to think about carefully.

You cannot ask everybody, so you are choosing, and choosing the people who had a good visit is what any business would do. That is not the same as building a filter. A first message asking how it went, with the review link going only to the people who answered well, is a screening system, and it is both the thing platforms object to and the thing customers spot immediately.

The honest version is simpler. Ask the people you would be pleased to hear from, ask them directly, and when somebody was unhappy, deal with that instead of asking them for anything. A complaint answered properly is worth more than a review, and the customer service response generator is for that conversation.

Never Offer Anything in Return

Back to where this started, because it is the mistake with the biggest downside.

A discount, a free coffee, an entry into a prize draw, a loyalty stamp. All of them turn a review into a payment, and reviews obtained that way are against Google’s own rules and can be removed. You lose the review, you paid for it, and the ones that remain look worse for the missing ones.

None of the messages in this tool offers anything, and none of them should be edited to. If you want to give a customer something for being loyal, give it to them for being loyal.

The thing you can offer is the reason, and every message here does. It genuinely helps people find us. It makes a real difference to a small business. That is not payment, it is context, and it works better than a discount because it is true.

What to Change Before You Send It

The message is a starting point. Three things are worth a look every time.

• The link. Check it is really in there and not the placeholder phrase. This is the failure that produces a message that reads perfectly and does nothing.
• The emoji. The warm and playful wordings carry one. If you would not send an emoji to a customer, take it out, because a message that does not sound like you is worse than a plain one.
• The thirty seconds. Several of the wordings promise the review takes thirty seconds. That is true if your link opens the review box and untrue if it opens your listing, so it is a claim that depends on the field above it.

What the Review Request Generator Cannot Do

It writes one message and copies it. Everything else is you.

• It does not send anything. No connection to WhatsApp, no number field, no account.
• It does not check your link. Whatever you paste goes into the message, working or not.
• It does not know who to ask. It has no customer list, no visit history and no idea who was happy.
• It cannot stop you asking twice. There is no record of anything, including who you sent it to.
• It does not track reviews. You will not find out from here whether anybody left one.
• Nothing is written by a model. A fixed library, chosen by two dropdowns and a button.

One Message, Sent Four Hundred Times

The arithmetic of reviews is dull and it is the whole game. A business seeing eight customers a day has around two thousand chances a year and usually takes about none of them, because asking is a small task that only exists if somebody remembers it.

Work out what that is worth before you decide how much effort to put in. The Google review calculator tells you how many five star reviews it takes to move your rating to where you want it, which is usually a smaller number than people expect and reachable in a couple of months of asking.

For the customers you see in person rather than message, a code on the counter does the same job without a conversation: the Google review QR generator turns the same link into something scannable, and the Google review sticker maker puts it on a card for the desk or the window.

With DMly the ask goes out on its own the right number of hours after a visit, to each customer once, which is the version of this that survives contact with a busy week.