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.
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