“Sir, please give 5 star.”
That is the most common review request in India and it is the worst available version of it, for two separate reasons, and one of them can get the reviews deleted.
The fix is not a better script. It is that the ask has to happen at a specific physical moment, in a thread you already have open, without naming a rating, and in whatever language the customer actually thinks in.
So: ask at the end of the job while the customer still has their phone out, send the link into the same WhatsApp conversation you have been using all week, say nothing about stars, and put your effort into Google before Justdial for a reason I will come to.
Why that sentence fails twice
It asks for a sentiment, not a review. Google’s policies prohibit soliciting reviews that express a particular opinion, and asking for five stars is exactly that. I went through what the review rules actually cover separately, including the much more common trap of filtering unhappy customers away from the public link, so I will not relitigate it here. The short version is that asking everybody the same way is both the compliant option and the effective one.
It produces a one-word review. Somebody who was told to give five stars gives five stars and no text. A rating with no sentences in it does very little for you, because the thing a prospect reads is the paragraph where somebody describes a situation like theirs.
A review saying “did my kitchen in HSR, finished two days early, cleaned up after” is worth ten ratings with nothing attached. You get those by asking a question, not by asking for a score.
The moment is physical, not digital
This is where most Indian businesses lose it, and the fix costs nothing.
The right moment is while you are still standing there. The job is done, it went well, the customer is holding the phone they would write the review on. Ask then: “Can I send you the Google link now? Takes a minute.”
Then watch them do it, or at least wait while they open it.
Every hour you wait after that moment costs you. The customer who said yes warmly at 4pm has, by 9pm, a chat list where your message sits below a school group, two forwards and their cousin. I have written about why that sort order loses you leads and it loses you reviews for exactly the same reason.
A technician asking in person, phone out, before leaving converts at a multiple of anything sent later. If your staff do the work and you do the asking from the office the next day, you have the sequence backwards.
The message, and the link problem
If you have to send it afterwards, send it into the WhatsApp thread you already have. Not a new broadcast, not an email. The thread where the quotation and the appointment and the “coming in 10 mins” already live.
Two things about the message.
Keep it short and name the thing before you paste the link. A bare Google review URL looks like spam, and in a market where everybody has been sent at least one fraudulent link, a long unexplained URL from a business gets treated with suspicion. “Here is the Google review link if you have a minute” followed by the link reads as legitimate. The link alone does not.
And ask a question rather than requesting a favour. “If you have a minute, could you mention what you had done and how it went?” gives the customer something to write. “Please give us a good review” gives them a task with no content in it, and a vague obligation they can postpone forever.
Get the short link from your Google Business Profile rather than sending people to search for you. Searching for you is where they find your competitor’s ad.
Let them write in their own language
Standard advice assumes English and it is wrong here.
A review in Kannada, Hindi, Tamil or transliterated Hinglish is worth more than a stilted English one, for two reasons. It reads as genuine, because it is how that person actually writes. And it matches how other local customers search and read, which is the whole point of a local listing.
So do not ask anybody to write in English, do not translate reviews, and do not apologise for a profile that has reviews in three scripts. That mixture is what a real neighbourhood business looks like.
If your customer asks what to write, give them a prompt rather than a sentence. The moment you supply the words, you get the same review eleven times, and eleven identical reviews are a pattern that looks exactly like what it looks like.
Google first, Justdial second
Both matter. The allocation is not close, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of taste.
Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence, and your reviews feed prominence. It is a factor you earn and cannot buy.
Justdial runs a different model, and this is public rather than my opinion: listings are free and the company sells paid packages that give listings more prominent placement. So on Justdial, position is substantially purchasable, which means the reviews you collect there do not buy you the same thing.
The trend is worth knowing too. Per Justdial’s own reported numbers for the quarter ending March 2026, as summarised in trade coverage I could not trace back to the filing itself, active listings grew about 12% year on year to 54.7 million while unique visitors fell about 5% to 182.4 million, with roughly 631,000 active paid campaigns. More businesses listed, fewer people looking.
I would not read a precise conclusion into secondhand figures. The direction is enough: a crowded directory with softening traffic is not where your first hundred reviews should go.
Keep the Justdial listing accurate, answer what arrives there, and spend the asking effort on Google.
One exception, and it is absolute
If you run a clinic or any medical practice, none of the above applies to you, because the NMC code prohibits soliciting patient testimonials outright. That is a conduct matter rather than a marketing trade-off, and I covered what you can do instead in local SEO for clinics.
Before lunch
Thirty minutes, three things.
Get your Google review short link from your Business Profile and save it where your staff can reach it in two taps. On the phone they actually carry, not in a folder on a laptop.
Then write the two-line message, with the link named before it is pasted, and send it to the last five customers whose jobs went well. Not a broadcast, individually, in the existing thread.
Then tell whoever finishes the work that asking is now part of finishing the work, and that the words are “can I send you the Google link now”, with nothing about stars in them.
If you’d like to think through why your reviews have stalled, or what to do about a profile that has ratings but no writing in them, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on SEO cover the rest of local visibility. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.