Most businesses think about review requests in terms of wording — what to say, how to phrase the ask. In practice, timing matters more than wording. Ask at the wrong moment and even a perfectly written message gets ignored.
Too soon feels transactional
Asking for a review the second a job wraps up or a payment clears can feel like you care more about the review than the work. Customers pick up on that, even subconsciously, and it shows in shorter, less enthusiastic reviews when they respond at all.
Too late loses the moment entirely
Wait a week or two and the specific details fade — the review, if it comes at all, ends up generic ("good service") instead of specific ("fixed our furnace same-day and explained exactly what was wrong"). Specific reviews are the ones that actually convince the next customer.
The sweet spot is usually 24-48 hours
Enough time for the customer to have lived with the result, not so much time that the details blur. This is a hard thing to do consistently by hand across dozens of jobs a month — which is the entire reason automated review requests exist as a category of tool in the first place.
JobLoop automates exactly this — asking customers for reviews at the right time, and catching unhappy ones privately before they go public.