All Your Review Requests Go Out At The Same Hour

Every review request your business has ever sent went out at 9:02 in the morning.

Not because anybody decided that. Because that is when the job runs. Somebody set it up a year ago, picked the hour that was in the box, and nothing has questioned it since. Your customers have been receiving the same message at the same minute of the morning for twelve months.

A timing problem wearing a response rate problem's clothes

When the replies stop coming, the message is what gets blamed.

So you rewrite it. You shorten it. You take out the word please, you put the word please back, you try a subject line with their first name in it, you cut the second paragraph. None of it moves. After a few rounds of that you decide your customers just do not leave reviews, which is a conclusion that quietly closes the whole subject.

This is a different problem from a request that never arrives at all, where the number is dead or the email bounced and nobody is watching the bounces. Yours arrived. It is also not a question about the moment inside the job when you ask. Yours is about a clock, and the clock belongs to your software rather than to anybody's life.

Who is never available at your send time

Think about what your customers are doing at your send hour.

If you work with trades, nine in the morning is a roof, a crawlspace, a van with no signal. If you work with people in offices, it is the first meeting of the day. If your customers are parents, it is the fifteen minutes between school drop off and everything else. If you serve retired customers, nine might be the best hour you could have picked.

The point is not that there is one correct time. The point is that a single send hour hard selects for one kind of day, and your customer list is almost certainly not one kind of person. Half of them are getting your message at the one moment they cannot act on it, and a review request that cannot be acted on when it arrives is a review request that gets scrolled past and never thought about again.

Nobody deletes it in anger. It just goes under.

The data you already have and have never read

You do not have enough volume to run a real test, and anybody who tells you to A/B test your send hour is describing a business with a lot more customers than you have.

What you do have is the reviews you already got. Every one of them has a timestamp on it.

Open your profile, look at your last twenty or thirty reviews, and write down roughly when each one went up. Hour of the day, day of the week. Those are moments when a customer of yours was free enough and willing enough to stop and write something about your business. That is not proof of anything and it does not tell you what would have happened at another hour. It is a hint, and a hint drawn from your actual customers beats a best practice drawn from somebody else's.

Most owners find a shape in it. Evenings. Lunch. Sunday afternoon. Whatever it is, it is probably not 9:02 on a Tuesday, and the gap between where your reviews actually come from and where your requests actually go is the thing worth fixing.

What to change, in order

Move the send off the hour your software found convenient. That is the whole first step and it costs nothing.

Then stop sending on a clock at all and start sending relative to the job. A request timed to a few hours after the work is finished is landing on somebody who remembers it, which beats any hour of the day you could pick. Most systems can do this and most of them were set up the lazy way instead.

If you send a second request to people who did not answer the first, send it at a different time of day. A follow up at the same hour as the original is testing the same conditions twice, and if the hour was the reason the first one failed, the second one fails for exactly the same reason.

Text and email are not the same question

A text at eight in the evening reads as intrusive coming from a business, even a business somebody likes. An email at eight in the evening just sits there quietly until morning, which is fine.

So the hour you choose depends on the channel, and a single send time applied to both is wrong for one of them by definition. Keep texts inside hours that feel like business hours for a person who is not at work. Let email go whenever, and let people open it when they want to.

The thing that makes the question much smaller

All of this is you trying to find a good moment to interrupt somebody from a distance.

There is a moment that needs no clock and no channel at all, which is the one where they are standing in front of you. Ask then and the timing question stops existing, because you are not competing with their day. You are already in it.

Do this

1. 1Find out what hour your review requests actually go out at. Most owners are guessing.
2. 2Move it off the default hour, whatever it is.
3. 3Switch the send from a fixed time to a delay after the job is finished.
4. 4Write down the hour and day of your last twenty or thirty reviews.
5. 5Send toward the pattern you see there rather than the pattern in the software.
6. 6Put the second request at a different time of day than the first.
7. 7Keep texts in waking hours and stop worrying about when emails land.
8. 8Ask in person whenever the job gives you the chance, so the send is only the backup.

Where the card fits

A tap card takes the timing question off the table for every customer you get to stand in front of.

There is no send hour, no channel, no wondering whether they were on a roof when it arrived. You put the card on the counter or hold it out at the handoff, they tap, and the review page opens on their own phone while the job is still the thing they are thinking about. The automated request then goes back to being what it should have been all along, which is the backup for the people you did not see. Cards and stands are at shop.optechsol.llc.

The short version

Your requests go out at one hour because a piece of software picked it, and that one hour chooses which half of your customers can act on the message. Move it, then stop sending on a clock and start sending a few hours after the job. Read the timestamps on the reviews you already have for a hint about when your customers are free, send the follow up at a different time than the first, and ask in person wherever the job lets you, because that moment needs no send time at all.