Most businesses have few Google reviews for one reason: nobody asks. Happy customers do not think to leave one, and unhappy ones do it unprompted, which skews the average. Asking every satisfied customer, at the right moment, changes the rating more than anything else you can do.
Timing is most of it
The window is short. Ask straight after the thing went well: the job finished, the order arrived, the appointment ended. A week later the customer has moved on and the ask feels like admin. This is why review requests work far better when they fire automatically on an event than when someone remembers to send them on a Friday.
How to ask
- Ask on the channel you already talk on. If the whole conversation happened on WhatsApp, the ask belongs on WhatsApp.
- Send the direct link. Every extra step loses people. Google provides a short review link for your business profile.
- Keep it to one sentence. A paragraph explaining why reviews matter to your business is about you, not them.
- Check the mood first. Asking someone how it went, and only sending the review link if the answer is positive, is the difference between collecting reviews and collecting one-star ratings.
What not to do
Do not offer discounts, entries into a draw, or anything else in exchange for a review. Google's policies prohibit incentivised reviews and enforcement can remove your reviews or affect the listing. Do not write them yourself, do not ask staff to, and do not filter out unhappy customers from ever being heard: routing negative feedback to yourself so you can fix it is fine, blocking someone from reviewing you is not.
Reviews and referrals are the same moment
A customer willing to leave a review is usually willing to recommend you to someone. Asking for the referral a couple of days after the review, rather than in the same message, tends to work better than doing both at once.