How to ask for a review at the end of a home service job

Ask every customer you served for a review, on the day the job ends, once they have walked through the work. Ask in two steps: one spoken sentence from whoever did the job, then a short message with the link. Before the walk-through the customer is still inspecting. A week later the relief has faded and the kitchen is dirty again. The window is a few hours wide, and many firms miss it by sending a link from the office on Monday.

"Every customer" is a rule, not a courtesy. If you ask only the people who look pleased, your page shows a rosier picture than your work, and the customers who read it can tell. Review platforms' rules discourage picking who gets the link, so read the current ones for the platform you use. Ask everyone, and deal with complaints as complaints.

Why does the end of the job work better than any other time?

A deep clean is judged when the family comes back into the flat and sees the bathroom tiles. If you wait, the customer remembers the one thing that bothered them, such as the crew arriving forty minutes late, and writes about that.

So treat the walk-through as the trigger. The supervisor shows every room and the customer says "fine" or points at something to redo. If they point at something, you redo it first, because asking a customer who is looking at a missed corner is awkward for both sides.

What does the crew say at the door, and what does the office send?

The spoken part is one sentence, said once. It comes from the person who has just spent four hours in the customer's home: "If you are happy with it, a few words on Google would help the next family find us. The office will send the link, no pressure."

The written part goes out the same day, from the firm's own WhatsApp number, with the customer's name and the job in it:

Hello Ms Deshpande, this is Anita from the Kothrud office. Thank you for having the team in today for the kitchen and bathroom deep clean. Would you write two lines about how it went, good or bad, here? [link] It helps when you mention what was done, for example the chimney or the grout. If anything was not right, reply here and I will sort it out.

The last line is service, not a filter: the link is in the message either way. You are asking for an honest account, not a good one.

A reply table for four kinds of customer

Everyone gets the link. What changes is the tone and the follow-up.

The third and fourth rows are the ones firms skip. A customer whose problem you fixed in front of them can be a convincing reviewer, because the review shows the fix. A customer who stays unhappy may write a hard review. That is information about your service, and a polite public reply from the owner tells the next reader how you behave when things go wrong. Do not offer anything in return for editing it.

Which link do you send?

One link, to one place. For a home service firm that is usually the Google Business Profile, because it is what shows when a neighbour searches. Copy the review link on a phone and save it as a quick reply in the WhatsApp Business app, so nobody types it from memory. Never send three links in one message; the customer picks none.

For example: a home cleaning firm in Pune

Imagine a firm in Pune that did about a dozen deep cleans in a good week and had a Google profile with a handful of reviews, mostly from relatives. This is an invented case with illustrative numbers. Their crews finished at six in the evening and left. The review message went out whenever the owner remembered, usually after the weekend, and began "Dear customer, kindly review us."

The timing was days late, and the message was a form letter with no name, no job and no reason. Customers ignored it, and the few who answered mostly had a complaint.

They changed three details. The supervisor asked for a walk-through before leaving and wrote down anything the customer pointed at. The office sent the message above by name to every customer. And a job with a redo got the same message the next morning, after the customer confirmed it was sorted.

Over the next two months, say 40 jobs produced 14 reviews: eleven were four or five stars that named the job ("did the chimney and the balcony grills"), two were three stars about a late crew, and one was a one-star about a broken tile. The owner replied to all three in plain words. The average dipped against what a hand-picked list would have shown, but the firm now knew its crews arrived late, and fixed the schedule.

When should you skip the ask?

Skip it only for reasons that have nothing to do with how the customer feels: a landlord handling a tenant move-out who does not live there, or a stopgap job where you have said a bigger repair is needed, so the review would judge unfinished work. If you have already asked this customer on an earlier job, ask for a referral the second time. If the booking came through a marketplace app that handles its own reviews, read that app's terms first.

Keeping the habit going

A review request dies when it depends on memory. Add one column to the job sheet, "walk-through done, review asked, posted", and have the office fill it the same evening. A blank in "asked" is the thing to chase, not a customer to avoid.

Before your next job, decide who does the walk-through and who sends the message, and save the text as a quick reply. If you want the profile and routine set up for your crews, online review generation and management is the work, and home services is the wider section for firms like yours. To start, tell us what you need.