Search this question and the answer comes back the same from every direction: ask right after the job, while the customer is still pleased and the work is fresh. That is true, and it is close to useless, because it describes a state your customer is in rather than a moment in your day that you can act on.
Nobody stands in a kitchen at the end of a service call and thinks "the customer is at peak satisfaction." They think about the invoice, the next address, and getting the van loaded. If the ask is going to happen, it has to hang off something that already happens.
Turn the moment into a trigger
Pick the event in your own routine that reliably marks the job as finished, and attach the ask to that. It should be something you already do every single time, without deciding to.
- Trades and mobile work: closing out the invoice, not pulling out of the drive. The invoice happens every time and leaves a record; the drive away happens while your hands are full.
- Appointments and clinics: checking the patient out at the desk, after the next booking is made.
- Restaurants and counters: settling the bill.
- Anything shipped: marking the order delivered.
The test is simple. If you had a busy week and forgot everything optional, would this thing still have happened? If yes, it is a trigger. If no, it is a good intention.
Early and late fail differently
Asking too early and asking too late are not two sizes of the same mistake.
Ask before the job is genuinely finished, while the technician is still packing up or the crown is still settling, and you are asking for a verdict on something that does not have one yet. The customer either ignores it or writes a review about a job that is not done.
Ask days later and the specific thing you did has blurred into a general impression of your trade. The review still arrives, and it says "great service, highly recommend." That review counts, but it does nothing for the next person reading, because it could have been written about anyone. A review written while the detail is still there names the problem, the room, the technician. Timing changes what the review says, not only whether it shows up.
Time of day is a separate decision
The trigger decides which day. It does not decide what hour the message lands, and no tool decides that for you: a request sent at eleven at night arrives at eleven at night.
If you are texting, that matters more, because a text arrives with a noise attached to it. Send inside the hours you would be willing to answer the phone.
In ReviewKit this lives in Settings as a send window: which days of the week requests may go out, what time of day, and which timezone that time is read in. The timezone is your business's, not each customer's, which is worth knowing if you serve a region that crosses a line on the map.
One honest caveat about how it behaves. The send window governs scheduled text requests. An email request goes out when you press send, which means the timing of your email asks is decided entirely by when you get round to sending them.
Batching is a timing decision you make by accident
Sitting down on Friday afternoon and sending the week's requests in one go feels organised, and it quietly throws the whole thing away. Monday's customer gets asked about a job they have half forgotten. Friday's customer gets asked before they have used the thing you fixed. Every customer gets a different distance from their own job, decided by the calendar rather than by you.
Sending at the trigger keeps that distance constant. If a batch is what it takes to get it done at all, make it a daily one rather than a weekly one, and send it at the end of the working day rather than at the end of the week.
The second ask
Silence is not a refusal. Someone meant to, put the phone down, and the thought went with it.
Send one follow-up a few days after the first, to the people who have not left a review yet, and leave it there. A third ask changes the relationship from a favour to a nag. Wording for both the first ask and the follow-up is in how to ask customers for reviews, and which channel to use for each is worked through in SMS vs email for review requests.
Then check your own sends
Every timing benchmark you can find online was measured on somebody else's customers, in somebody else's trade, and you cannot audit any of it. Your own send log you can audit.
Look at the requests you sent at the counter against the ones you sent in a batch, and compare how many were opened and acted on. That comparison is small, slow and specific to you, and it beats any number a blog can hand you. If the ask is not landing at all, the causes are usually mechanical rather than a matter of timing, and they are listed in how to get more Google reviews.
Make the trigger do the work. Build your free Google review link once, put it in the message, and send the ask as part of closing out the job. ReviewKit keeps the link, the wording and the send window in one place, with no contract and a cancel button you can press yourself.