Your Google rating is your storefront. It decides whether the next homeowner who searches "AC repair near me" calls you or the shop down the road. Escape builds your rating one finished job at a time.
What happens after every service call
One day after the call is marked complete, the customer gets a review ask — an email and a text, both linking straight to your Google review page.
That is the whole sequence. Every customer gets the same ask.
🔴 Why everyone gets the same ask — this is a Google policy, not a preference
It is tempting to survey customers first and only send the review link to the happy ones. Google explicitly prohibits it. It is called review gating, and it violates their prohibited-content policy: you may not solicit reviews selectively based on how positive you expect them to be, or discourage negative ones.
The penalties are not theoretical — gated reviews can be removed, and a business profile can be suspended.
Escape does not gate. Everyone who completes a service call gets the same message with the same link. Do not add a filter, a star-rating screen, or a "how did we do?" survey in front of it. If a vendor offers you one, that is the thing Google is describing.
The upside of doing it properly: an ungated ask goes to your whole satisfied majority, not just the ones who passed a filter. Most shops find volume matters more than the filter ever did.
What your office should do
- Watch the inbox after a job. A customer with a problem often says so in reply to something. That reply arrives in your inbox like any other message — and it is worth far more attention than the review itself.
- Act the same day. A same-day call catches a problem while it is still fixable, and most fixed problems never become one-star reviews.
- Respond to the reviews you get — good and bad. A profile with owner replies reads as a business that is paying attention.
What your techs should do
- Mark the call complete when it's actually complete. The whole sequence rides on that — see What moves automatically. A job closed out from the truck three days later sends a review ask three days late.
- Don't ask twice. The system already asked, by email and text. A manual "hey, could you leave us a review?" on top reads as needy.
What this does not do
Being straight with you, because it changes how your office should work:
- It does not screen anyone out. An unhappy customer gets the same ask as a happy one — see the policy note above. Your protection is fixing the problem before the ask goes out, which is a one-day window and a reason to watch the inbox.
- It does not detect an unhappy customer on its own. Nothing reads sentiment. If a customer tells you something is wrong, a human has to notice and act.
- The review link goes straight to your Google page. There is no rating screen in between, by design.
Sales visits and return visits are excluded
- Sales / estimate visits get a thank-you instead — no work was done, so there is nothing to review yet.
- Return visits get nothing. The job is by definition unfinished, and asking for a review mid-problem is the fastest way to earn a bad one.
Want reviews answered too?
With CAPE, Escape also replies to your Google reviews — thanking the happy ones and responding professionally to the rest, so your public profile looks attended-to without your office writing replies.