How to Automate Customer Review Requests (Email + SMS)

Trustivo — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 23:32:01 +0000

Most local businesses lose reviews for one boring reason: nobody asks. The fix is automation. Here's how I think about building a review-request flow — the architecture and the gotchas.

Trigger on the right event

When a job or transaction completes, fire an event — a webhook from your POS/CRM, or a simple "add customer" action. That event kicks off the sequence.

Queue it, don't blast it

Don't send instantly. Push the request to a job queue and schedule it for the moment the experience is freshest. A delayed job or cron worker handles the timing.

Go multi-channel

Email (SendGrid/Postmark) plus SMS (Twilio) consistently beats either alone. Track deliverability per channel so you know what's actually landing.

Timed follow-ups

Schedule one or two polite reminders — and critically, stop the sequence the moment a review is detected so you're not nagging happy customers.

Reduce friction

Deep-link straight to the Google or Facebook review form. Every extra tap kills your conversion rate.

Aggregate the results

Pull reviews back through platform APIs (Google Business Profile API, etc.) into one dashboard so you're not checking ten sites.
The genuinely hard parts: deliverability, frequency caps so you don't look like spam, and reliably detecting when a review has landed.
This is essentially the engine behind Trustivo, the review-automation tool I work on — if you'd rather use the productized version than build it yourself, it's at trustivo.com.

DEV Community: Trustivo

How to Automate Customer Review Requests (Email + SMS)