Ask for the Review in the Right Two Hours

Two hours after the appointment they still feel the result and their phone is already in their hand. By evening you are a pleasant thing that happened earlier.

A client walks out happy. Six hours later they are making dinner and you are a pleasant thing that happened earlier. Ask then and you get nothing, and you have spent the ask.

The window is short and it is worth treating as a real part of the service.

Why two hours

Right after the appointment two things are true at once, and they are both temporary.

They still feel the result. Fresh color, a clean fade, lashes they keep catching in the mirror. That feeling is what a five-star review is made of, and it fades faster than the work does.

And they are between things. Out of the chair, phone in hand, in the car or on the walk home. That is a two-minute window where writing something is easy. Ask at 9pm and you are asking someone in bed to open a browser.

Ask at the chair instead and you get a different problem: they say yes to your face, mean it, and forget by the car park. The ask has to land when they are alone with their phone.

What Booked does, and what it needs from you

If you set a review link on your profile, Booked sends the client a message about two hours after their appointment with that link in it. It goes on the same channel their confirmation went to, so email if that is what you have for them, text if you have a phone.

Two things worth knowing.

It needs the link. No review link on the profile means no message. That is the whole switch, and it is the step people miss.

Booked does not collect reviews from your booking page. The link points wherever you send it, usually your Google listing. Reviews shown on your Booked page get there two other ways: the Import wizard, which takes a CSV out of Google or Yelp, and adding one by hand for feedback a client gave you in person.

Send them to Google. A review on your Google listing does work your booking page cannot: it feeds the profile that is now your real homepage.

The ask itself

The message does the timing. You still have to not sound like software.

Name the service. "Thanks for coming in for your balayage today" beats "Thanks for your recent visit", and it takes the same number of seconds to set up.

Ask for one thing. A link, a sentence, done. Every extra request halves the response.

Do not pre-negotiate the rating. "If you were happy, would you mind leaving five stars" reads as a script and, on most platforms, breaks the rules you are operating under. Ask for the review. The stars look after themselves.

Then answer them

Replying is the half that gets skipped. Open Dashboard → Reviews and reply publicly. The reply sits under the review on your booking page, labeled as coming from the shop.

Answer the good ones in one line. Answer the bad ones once, briefly, without relitigating. The audience for a reply to a one-star is never the person who wrote it. It is the next reader deciding whether you are reasonable.

You can hide a review, which pulls it off your public page and out of your star average while leaving it visible to you, or delete it permanently. Hide is nearly always the right one. Delete is for a row that should never have existed, like a duplicate from an import.

Do the arithmetic before you dismiss it

Say you see forty clients a week and the request goes to all of them. A 5% response rate is two reviews a week. That is a hundred a year, on a listing that probably has eleven.

Nothing else you do this month moves your search ranking that far for that little effort.

Set it up this week

The timing is handled. What is left is having somewhere to send them, and answering the ones who show up.