Is It Legal to Text Customers Asking for a Review?

Sending a text after a job is one of the most effective ways to collect reviews, and it is also a message that touches real telecoms law. The good news: review requests sit in a more lenient category than most marketing texts, as long as a few basic rules are followed.

The short answer

Yes, you can text customers asking for a review, in most regions, as long as you have a lawful basis to contact them and you give them a clear way to stop receiving messages. The specifics differ by country (the TCPA in the US, PECR and UK GDPR in the UK, similar frameworks elsewhere), but the underlying principle is the same everywhere: only message people you have a genuine relationship with, identify yourself clearly, and always offer an easy opt out.

Why review requests usually count as transactional, not marketing

In the US, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act draws a sharp line between marketing messages and transactional or informational ones. Marketing texts, like a discount code or a sale announcement, need prior express written consent, the strictest standard. Transactional messages, tied to a service the customer already received, like an appointment reminder or, generally, a review request about a job you just completed for them, sit under a lower consent bar in most interpretations, because the message relates directly to an existing transaction rather than trying to sell something new.

This distinction matters in practice. A review request that simply asks how a job went reads very differently, legally and in tone, from a text trying to upsell an unrelated service.

What you still need to get right

• Only text numbers you collected directly from the customer in the course of doing business with them, never a purchased or scraped list.
• Identify your business clearly in the message itself, do not send anonymous looking texts.
• Send within reasonable hours, generally not before 8am or after 9pm in the customer's local time zone.
• Keep records of where each number came from and when, in case you ever need to show how consent was obtained.

Consent and how to collect it properly

The cleanest form of consent is simply having done business with the customer using the phone number they gave you for that job. If a customer books an appointment and provides their mobile number for that purpose, sending a related review request afterwards is on solid ground. What is not on solid ground is pulling numbers from a CRM that were collected for an unrelated purpose, importing a purchased list, or texting a number from a business card with no record of the customer agreeing to be contacted that way.

Letting customers opt out

Every jurisdiction with rules in this area agrees on one thing: customers need an easy way to stop the messages, and that request needs to be honoured promptly. In practice this means including a simple way to reply and stop, with most carriers expecting the word STOP to work, and making sure that once someone opts out, they are not texted again. This is not optional politeness, it is usually a legal requirement, and ignoring an opt out is one of the fastest ways to turn a minor compliance gap into a real complaint.

What happens if you get this wrong

Penalties vary by country but are not trivial anywhere. In the US, TCPA violations can carry statutory damages of several hundred dollars per message, and that can add up fast if a single bad batch goes out to a long list. In the UK and EU, PECR and GDPR violations can bring fines from the relevant data protection authority. Beyond the legal exposure, getting flagged by carriers for unwanted messages can also affect deliverability for every message you send afterwards, which is its own quiet cost.

A simple compliance checklist

• Only message customers using a number they gave you directly, for a service they actually received.
• Identify your business by name in the message.
• Keep the message tied to that specific job or appointment, not a separate marketing pitch.
• Include or support an easy opt out, and honour it immediately.
• Send within reasonable local hours.
• Keep a basic record of consent in case you are ever asked to show it.

None of this is complicated once it is built into the process rather than handled manually for every message. The businesses that run into trouble are almost always the ones treating texting as an afterthought rather than a small, repeatable system with the basics built in from the start.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Rules vary by country and state, and change over time, so if SMS marketing is a meaningful part of your business, it is worth a quick check with a lawyer familiar with the rules in your specific region.