Two customers had the same haircut on the same Friday. One got the review request at 5pm the same day and left five stars from her couch. The other got it at 9am Wednesday and never opened the email.
The main guide covered why timing beats copy. This one covers the mechanics of the send. When to fire, what event to fire on, who to skip, and how to handle the second nudge without reading as pursuit.
Why the two-to-six-hour window works
- 0hVisit ends
- 1–2hSend request
- 24hNudge once
- 72hStop nudging
- 0hVisit ends
- 1–2hSend request
- 24hNudge once
- 72hStop nudging
In that window, the visit is still the most interesting thing that happened to the customer today. The memory is warm, her phone is nearby, and she has not yet been pulled into work email, kid pickup, or a grocery run.
Outside the window, the request competes with everything else in her day. By the next morning it is background noise. By day three it is spam. Response rates fall in that same shape, and there is no clever subject line that fixes bad timing.
Fire on the appointment-completed event
Not a nightly batch. Not a next-day cron. The moment your booking tool marks the appointment as completed, a short delay starts. Send inside the window that delay defines.
Most modern booking tools support this natively. If yours does not, that is the seam to close before anything else in the review flow, because everything downstream depends on it firing at the right moment.
Who to skip
The request should not go to every customer. Sending anyway is how a bad Tuesday becomes a permanent one-star Google review.
- No-shows. Skip entirely.
- Same-day cancels. Skip entirely.
- Customers who flagged a complaint during the visit. Route to a private feedback path instead.
- Customers who have already left a review in the last 90 days.
Send-time collisions
If the customer just paid, wait fifteen minutes. Two messages inside a five-minute span reads as clumsy and slightly automated in the wrong way. If the payment happens after service, the review request rides right behind it with enough separation to feel intentional, like a receipt and a thank-you sent by a person who noticed.
One channel per customer
Send on the channel the customer booked with. Not both. Not the other channel as a fallback three days later. Match the ask to how the customer chose to interact with you in the first place.
The one nudge
If the first request does not produce a review in three days, send one soft nudge. Same channel. Shorter message. That is the last message. A third nudge is where a happy customer becomes an annoyed one, and that arithmetic never works out in your favor.
Worked example. A haircut appointment on Friday afternoon
Service ends at 3:45 PM. Payment posts at 3:52. The review request sends automatically at 6:52 PM, three hours after payment, still inside the same evening.
The customer opens the text between dinner and Netflix. The visit is still the freshest thing in their day. Two-thirds of responses arrive before bedtime. One soft nudge at 10 AM the following Monday picks up another slice.
Change the trigger to next-day 10 AM and the same shop sees response rate drop by roughly a third. Same customers, same request, worse timing.
Frequently asked questions
start here
Wire a review path that fires on the right event.
Fixed-price Review Engine install. Send timing, skip rules, and one-tap review links inside your booking tool.
60 seconds. No card. Report emailed to you.