Set up automated Google review requests by SMS

The outcome of this guide is a review engine that runs off your finished jobs. After a job is done, SMS365 texts the customer a tracked link to your Google review page. Happy customers tap through and leave a review. Anyone who replies unhappy is routed to a person before they ever reach the public page. By the end you will have this configured, tested, and sending, with click tracking so you can see what is actually working.

Contacts, campaigns, and link tracking work on every plan. Routing replies to the right place and letting the assistant triage them uses the AI assistant and team inbox, which are Premium.

What you need first

• Your Google review link. In your Google Business Profile, use the "Get more reviews" share link, the short URL that opens the review box directly. Have it ready to paste.
• A dedicated number under Add-ons, about $10 per month, so a customer can reply and you can catch an unhappy one before it becomes a public one-star.
• Prepaid credit topped up under Billing.
• A way to know a job is finished, so you can trigger the request. This might be a list you add completed customers to, or an appointment marked done.

A word before you build this. Never fake a review, never write one yourself, and never offer a discount or an entry in a draw in exchange for one. Google prohibits incentivised reviews and Australian consumer law treats fake or paid reviews as misleading. What follows asks real customers for honest feedback, nothing more.

Step by step setup

1. Add the dedicated number. Buy one under Add-ons so replies come back two-way. Confirm it works by sending yourself a test from Compose.
2. Build the review message with a tracked link. In Compose, write the request and paste your Google review link. Link rewriting happens automatically, so the link becomes a short tracked one and you get a click count without doing anything. Keep it warm and specific to the job.

   Hi Sarah, thanks for choosing Northside Electrical today. If you have a spare minute, a quick Google review really helps a small local business: [review link]. No worries if not. Cheers, Dan.

3. Decide the timing. Send while the job is fresh, ideally the same day or the morning after. A review request that arrives a week later gets forgotten. If you work off completed appointments, a short delay after the appointment time works well.
4. Set up the reply triage. This is the step that protects your rating. Go to Settings then AI assistant and turn it on in at least Suggest replies mode. Add a business context that tells it to route any unhappy or negative reply to a person and never to send such a customer to the public review page. Complaints are handed to a human by design, so an unhappy reply becomes a conversation with you rather than a one-star for everyone.
5. Use the team inbox to work the replies. Open Conversations, the shared inbox. Assign the unhappy threads to whoever owns customer care, add an internal note with the context, and use a canned reply to respond fast. Fixing the problem privately is what turns a would-be one-star into a saved customer.
6. Send to the right people. Add finished-job customers to a list, or on Premium build a dynamic segment from rules, then send the request to that group from Compose. Only ask customers whose job actually went well.

What the customer sees

A happy customer gets the text the evening after the job, taps the link, and lands straight on your Google review box with the stars ready. The click is counted against the tracked link, so you can see how many people opened it. An unhappy customer replies instead of tapping:

Honestly the guy was two hours late and left a mess.

That reply never triggers a push to the public page. The assistant flags it, the thread lands in your inbox, and a person replies:

Sarah, I am really sorry, that is not our standard. I would like to make it right. Can I call you this afternoon? Dan, Northside Electrical.

The difference is a fixed problem and a retained customer instead of a public complaint you cannot take back.

Read the click count, not a guess

Because the review link is tracked, a click count is an honest number of taps, counted per click rather than estimated. A prefetch by a link scanner is redirected but not counted, so the number reflects real people. Watch the ratio of clicks to sends: if lots open the link but few reviews appear, the friction is on the Google side, and if few even open it, the message or the timing needs work.

Test it before you rely on it

Send the request to your own mobile first. Confirm the tracked link opens your actual Google review box and not the wrong business, and that the click registers. Then, from a second phone or a test contact, reply with a negative message and confirm two things: it is not answered by an automatic push to the review page, and it lands in Conversations for a person. Never send a review campaign you have not watched arrive and click yourself.

How this fits together

The strategy behind asking well, and the timing that gets the most five-star reviews, is in getting more Google reviews by text. For the exact wording, including how to ask without sounding needy, see the review request message that earns five stars. And because the whole safeguard depends on catching a reply, why two-way SMS matters explains why the dedicated number does the heavy lifting here. See where reviews sit among the platform's other jobs on the use cases page.

An honest word on delivery

SMS365 marks a message "sent" when it has been handed to the carrier, and "delivered" only when a genuine delivery receipt returns. For review requests the tracked click count tells you more than delivery status anyway, because a click is proof the customer both received the message and acted on it.

Once this is running, the reviews that used to depend on remembering to ask now arrive steadily off every good job, and the bad experiences reach you privately first, where you can still do something about them.