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A customer who has just rated you 4–5★ is the most willing they will ever be to recommend you. Referral requests catch that moment: a day after a positive review, they get one short message asking if they know someone who needs the same kind of work — and whoever they name lands in your CRM as a lead with a task to call them. This is off by default. Turn it on in Reputation → Settings → Referral asks.

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How it works

  1. A customer taps 4 or 5 stars on your review page.
  2. On the thank-you screen they’re offered “Refer a friend” right away — some people are happy to do it in the moment.
  3. A day later (your delay setting) they get one message — SMS first, email as a fallback — with a link to your referral page. If they already referred someone from the thank-you screen, that message is skipped.
  4. They enter one name plus a phone number or an email, and anything you should know.
  5. That person becomes a lead in Contacts, tagged referral, with a note saying who referred them.
  6. A high-priority task (“Call referral: …”) is created, due in 4 business hours, and your owners get a notification.
Everything shows up under Reputation → Referrals: who you asked, who opened the ask, and every referral you’ve received.

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We never message the referred person

The person being referred never gave you permission to contact them — their friend did. So ServiceBooked creates the lead and the task, and stops there. Nobody gets an automated text or email from us on their behalf. That’s a CASL requirement, and it’s also just how referrals work: the value is a warm introduction, which means a human picking up the phone.

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Settings

Messages are only ever sent inside 9am–8pm in your timezone, and a customer who has replied STOP to your texts is never asked.

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Sending one by hand

Reputation → Referrals → Ask for a referral lets you pick any customer and send the ask now — useful right after a job you know went well. This works whether or not the automatic trigger is on; the re-ask window still applies.

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Wording

The message text lives in the Referral Request recipe under Settings → Automations, in the same place as your review-request wording, and follows your communication language (English, French, or both).

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Next

Review requests

The sequence that produces the positive review this ask hangs off.

The review funnel

What happens when a customer taps a star.