How to ask for a customer review (with templates that don't sound desperate)

A mate of mine has been decorating round the same three towns for eleven years. Good work, tidy van, books out four weeks ahead on word of mouth alone. Last spring he finally set his Google listing up properly and sat there looking at it. Two reviews. One of them from his sister-in-law.

He'd done something like six hundred jobs. He just never asked, because asking felt like fishing for compliments on his own work.

That's the actual problem here. Not the wording. The wording is the easy bit. Below is when to ask, where to send them, three templates you can lift straight off the page, and the bit of UK law that changed in 2025 and now makes "leave us a five star and I'll knock a tenner off" a genuinely bad idea.

Why the ask usually fails

Three reasons, and none of them are about how polite your wording was.

You asked too late. The job finished on the Tuesday, you got round to the paperwork on the Sunday, and by then the new bathroom is just the bathroom. It isn't news any more. The window where a customer is still slightly delighted is measured in days.

You asked for the wrong amount of effort. "It'd be great if you could leave us a review sometime" asks the customer to remember, find the platform, work out which listing is yours, log in, and write something. Five steps. A link in a text is one step.

You asked in a way that let them say yes without doing it. Everyone says yes on the doorstep. Yes is free. The follow-up text is what turns yes into a review, and most trades never send it because it feels like nagging.

It isn't nagging. One text, once, after they already said yes, is normal admin. You'd chase an invoice with more force than that.

The 48-hour window, and how to work it

The whole system is two moves.

Move one: the handover ask

Do it during the walk round at the end, not as you're pulling the van door shut. You're already stood next to the work, they're already saying it looks better than they expected, and the ask fits the conversation instead of interrupting it.

Why that works. You've given a reason (most of my work comes from Google), you've made it conditional on them actually being happy, you've said what happens next, and you've removed the deadline. Nobody feels cornered. And you've pre-warned them about the text, so the text isn't out of the blue.

Move two: the text, same day or next

Short. Link. Done. No paragraph about how much their support means to your small family business.

Three things are doing work in there. The job is named, so they know it's you and not a scam text. The "two minutes" sets the size of the favour. And the last line is deliberate: you've given them somewhere to complain that isn't the review box. If something is bugging them, you'd rather hear it on the phone on Thursday than read it in public on Saturday.

The email version, for jobs where you never had a phone chat

Commercial work, landlords, letting agents, anything where you dealt with an office rather than a person in a kitchen.

Note that the review ask is riding along with something the customer wants anyway, the certificates. That's the cheapest possible way to get an email opened.

Where to actually send them

Pick one primary place and stop. Sending customers a choice of three platforms is how you end up with one review on each and none of them looking convincing.

Google Business Profile. First choice for nearly every domestic trade. Free, no membership, and it's the thing that decides whether you appear in the map results when someone searches "plumber near me" at half nine on a Sunday night. Reviews also show up next to your phone number, so they get read at the exact moment someone is deciding whether to call. If your profile isn't set up properly yet, that's the job before this one: see the 90-minute Google Business Profile setup for trades.

Checkatrade, TrustATrader, MyBuilder, Rated People. Worth feeding only if you're already paying for the membership. The reviews stay inside their walled garden and largely help their SEO rather than yours, but if you're spending a few hundred quid a year on a directory you may as well have the review count that justifies it. We put the real numbers side by side in the directory cost-per-lead comparison.

Trustpilot. Only really earns its place if you're chasing commercial contracts, insurance work, or anything where a procurement person is doing due diligence on you. Homeowners searching for a joiner are not on Trustpilot.

Facebook. Free, and in a lot of towns the local Facebook groups are the real lead engine. A recommendation on a "Tradesmen in Stockport" thread is worth more than any of the above. You can't ask for those directly, but customers who've already left you a Google review are the ones who'll tag you in a group later.

Worked example: what asking is actually worth

Take Adam Wójcik trading as Wójcik Plumbing, a one-man band with a van, doing domestic work in a mid-sized town.

Over twelve months: 58 domestic jobs, average invoice £680, so turnover of £39,440. He asked for a review on precisely none of them, because it felt awkward.

Year two he runs the two-step: handover ask, then a text. Not on every job, because some jobs are emergency call-outs at 11pm and some customers he'd rather not hear from again. Say he asks on 44 of the 58.

• Asked at handover: 44 jobs
• Said yes on the doorstep: 38 (people are polite)
• Actually left a review after the text: 19

Around 43% of asks turning into reviews is realistic for a two-step in-person ask. It would be closer to 10% on email alone with no verbal ask first.

Now put a value on it. Assume a directory lead costs him £22 and one in four of those leads converts into a job. That's £88 of lead cost per won job. If nineteen fresh Google reviews over a year pull in even six extra jobs he wouldn't otherwise have had, he's saved £528 of lead spend and added roughly £4,080 of turnover. For the cost of about eight minutes of texting spread across a year.

Those conversion assumptions are his, not gospel. Swap in your own lead cost and your own close rate and run it again. The point stands whatever numbers you put in: the ask is free and the lead isn't.

The rules changed in 2025, so know where the line is

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 brought in new unfair commercial practices rules that took effect on 6 April 2025, enforced by the Competition and Markets Authority. Two parts matter to a trade firm:

• Fake reviews are banned. Writing your own, having family write them, buying them, or presenting a review as genuine when it isn't. The CMA can act directly rather than going through the courts first, and penalties can run to a percentage of turnover.
• Incentivised reviews have to be disclosed. If you gave someone anything of value for a review, that has to be made clear in the review. Concealing it is the offence.

On top of the law, Google's own review policy prohibits offering money, discounts, gifts, or entry to a prize draw in exchange for reviews, and prohibits review gating. Break that and you risk your reviews being stripped or your profile suspended, which is worse than never having asked.

So for a small firm the safe position is simple. Ask everyone you're happy to ask. Offer nothing. Never write one yourself, never let a relative write one, and don't run the raffle.

If a customer offers on their own to mention that you did their neighbour's guttering for free, that's fine, that's their honest experience. You paying for words is not.

Dealing with the bad one

You'll get one eventually. Usually about something that wasn't your fault, on a job where the customer changed their mind twice.

Reply once. Publicly. Short, dated, factual, no sarcasm. Something like: "Thanks for the feedback, Dave. We agreed the change to the tiling on 14 August and I priced it before starting, but I'm sorry it didn't land how you expected. Ring me on [number] and I'll come and look at it."

Future customers read the reply harder than they read the complaint. A calm, specific answer under a two-star review does more for you than the two-star costs you. A defensive essay does the opposite.

If the review is straight-up untrue, or from someone who was never a customer, don't argue in the thread. Report it to the platform with your job dates and invoice reference. If it crosses into something defamatory and it's costing you real work, Citizens Advice can point you at your options, but that's a last resort and rarely worth the legal spend.

What NOT to do

1. Don't offer anything for a review. No tenner off, no free service call, no bottle at Christmas tied to the review. It breaches Google's policy, and undisclosed incentives are now a banned practice under the 2024 Act.
2. Don't gate. Sending "how did we do, 1 to 10" and then only showing the Google link to the eights and above is exactly the pattern platforms police. Ask properly or don't.
3. Don't ask twice. One verbal ask, one text. If they don't bite, let it go. The third message costs you the repeat job and the recommendation, both of which are worth more than the review was.
4. Don't ask before the snags are done. Asking while there's still a radiator to bleed or a bit of trim to refit invites the review to mention it. Get the sign-off signed, then ask.
5. Don't write it for them. Handing a customer suggested wording produces reviews that all sound the same, which readers notice and platforms flag. A short scruffy real review beats a polished fake one every time.

The habit that makes it stick

Reviews die as a habit for the same reason invoicing does. It's one more thing to remember at the end of a long day, and there's no system holding it.

Bolt it onto something you already do. The invoice goes out the day the job finishes, and the review text goes out with it. Same trip to the phone. If you're logging your jobs in the TradeStash app you've already got the customer's number and the job details sat there when you send the invoice from the van, so the review text is a ten-second job on the back of it rather than a separate task you'll do on Sunday and then won't.

Nineteen reviews in a year is one text a fortnight. That's the whole discipline.