Can I Exclude Certain Customers From Review Automations?

Yes, you can easily exclude specific customers from receiving automated review requests, either manually inside your SoTrustworthy dashboard or automatically using triggers in connected platforms like Jobber and HubSpot. While excluding contacts for operational reasons—such as open billing disputes, canceled jobs, or explicit opt-out requests—is fully supported, your exclusion strategy must align with search engine guidelines. Selectively filtering out unhappy customers to artificially inflate your rating violates Google review policies against review gating.

Here is a complete breakdown of how to properly exclude customers, how our automated safeguards protect your account, and how to set up exclusion rules across your existing software stack.

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Valid Operational Reasons to Exclude Customers

Automating your review requests saves hours of manual follow-up, but sending a automated text to the wrong client at the wrong time can create unnecessary friction. There are several legitimate operational reasons to pull a customer out of an active automation sequence:

• Active Disputes or Unresolved Claims: If a homeowner has an open damage claim, an ongoing workmanship investigation, or a severe billing dispute, sending a review request before the issue is resolved hurts customer relations and likely results in a negative review that could have been avoided through customer service intervention.
• Explicit Opt-Outs: Under federal law and TCPA guidelines, any customer who has explicitly requested not to receive text communications must be removed from automated SMS sequences.
• Incomplete or Canceled Jobs: If a job was canceled due to bad weather, supply chain delays, or scheduling conflicts before service was rendered, sending a request asking "How did we do?" creates confusion.
• Internal Staff, Test Accounts, and Vendors: Subcontractors, material suppliers, property managers, and internal team members often end up in your service history, but they should not receive customer feedback sequences.
• Recent Recipients: If a property owner hires your plumbing or HVAC company three times in two weeks, sending them three separate review requests will annoy them and increase opt-out rates.

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Exclusions vs. Prohibited "Review Gating"

It is crucial to distinguish between operational exclusions and review gating. Google's explicit policies state that business owners cannot selectively solicit feedback only from customers who are known to have had a positive experience, nor can they screen customers through pre-qualifying questions (e.g., asking "Did you love our service? Click Yes or No") before directing them to a review site.

SoTrustworthy is built to keep your business fully compliant with Google and carrier guidelines:

• No Gating Architecture: We do not route unhappy customers to a private feedback form while sending happy customers to Google. All review links direct directly to your official Google Business Profile review interface.
• Legitimate System Pauses: Pausing an automation sequence for a client while your operations manager resolves an incomplete job is standard customer service practice. Systematically filtering out every customer who gave verbal feedback under 5 stars before sending the automated campaign is considered review gating.

By using SoTrustworthy's built-in exclusion controls correctly, you maintain full compliance while protecting your business reputation and adhering to carrier standards.

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How to Exclude Customers Manually in SoTrustworthy

If you are on our Starter Plan or managing contacts directly within SoTrustworthy, you can exclude any customer in a few clicks before or during an active review campaign.

Method 1: Toggling "Do Not Contact" on a Single Profile

1. Log in to your SoTrustworthy dashboard.
2. Go to the Contacts tab in the main menu.
3. Use the search bar to locate the customer by name, phone number, or email.
4. Click on the contact to open their detail view.
5. Toggle the Exclude from Review Automations switch to ON.
6. (Optional) Select a reason code (e.g., Open Service Ticket, Customer Opt-Out, Internal Contact) for your internal records.

Once toggled, the system immediately cancels any scheduled SMS or email messages queued for that individual. Their profile remains in your database for reporting and record-keeping, but our automation engine will skip them entirely.

Method 2: Suppressing Contacts During Bulk Uploads

If you upload customer lists via CSV (common for seasonal service businesses or campaign launches), you can include a column in your spreadsheet titled Exclude or Do Not Contact.

• Set the cell value to TRUE or YES for any row you wish to suppress.
• During file mapping, map that column to SoTrustworthy’s Automation Exclusion field.
• The system will import the contact data but skip queuing review requests for those marked rows.

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Automating Exclusions via Jobber and HubSpot Integrations

If you use Jobber or HubSpot (available on our Growth and Pro plans), you do not need to manually log into SoTrustworthy to stop a review request. You can trigger exclusions natively from the tools your office staff uses every day.

Excluding Customers in Jobber

SoTrustworthy syncs with Jobber via API to monitor job status changes. You can prevent review automations from triggering using two native Jobber workflows:

1. Job Cancellation Status: If a job status is marked as Canceled in Jobber instead of Completed, SoTrustworthy automatically ignores the record and will not send an SMS request.
2. Custom Job Tags: You can create a custom tag in Jobber named No-Review or Skip-Automation. When an admin or field tech attaches this tag to a job or client profile before closing out the invoice, SoTrustworthy detects the tag and aborts the review request trigger.

Excluding Customers in HubSpot

For businesses managing complex customer lifecycles in HubSpot, SoTrustworthy respects custom contact properties and deal stages:

1. Contact Property Triggers: Create a property in HubSpot named Review Automation Exclusion (Single Checkbox or Dropdown). Map this field to SoTrustworthy in your integration settings.
2. Workflow Suppression Rules: Set up a HubSpot Workflow that automatically checks this box if a ticket status is set to Unresolved, Disputed, or Refund Issued. When SoTrustworthy receives the closed-won deal or job webhook, it checks the exclusion flag first. If marked true, the automation halts instantly.

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Built-In Automated Protections (Throttling & Opt-Outs)

SoTrustworthy includes three automatic exclusion guardrails that operate in the background without requiring any manual tagging from your team:

1. Review-Request Throttling

To prevent spamming repeat clients, SoTrustworthy enforces automated review throttling. By default, the system will not send more than one review request sequence to the same phone number within a customizable window (e.g., 60, 90, or 180 days). Even if your field management software marks three jobs as complete for the same customer in a single month, SoTrustworthy only sends a review request for the first completed job.

2. Automatic TCPA & A2P 10DLC Opt-Out Processing

Because SoTrustworthy uses an SMS-first workflow to deliver maximum conversion rates, strictly adhering to SMS compliance is required. If a customer replies to any automated review text with standard opt-out keywords—such as STOP, CANCEL, UNSUBSCRIBE, or QUIT—our messaging system automatically marks that contact as globally opted out. Future automated attempts to text that number will be blocked at the network level.

3. Duplicate Contact Suppression

When new customer records sync from your CRM or CSV imports, SoTrustworthy normalizes and checks phone numbers and email addresses against existing database entries. If a customer exists in an active review drip sequence, duplicate submissions are suppressed automatically to avoid sending multiple identical messages.

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Summary of Exclusions by Plan Level

Feature / Exclusion Capability	Starter Plan	Growth Plan	Pro Plan
Manual Contact Exclusions (Dashboard)	Yes	Yes	Yes
CSV Bulk Upload Exclusions	Yes	Yes	Yes
Automatic TCPA "STOP" Opt-Out Engine	Yes	Yes	Yes
Review Request Throttling	Yes	Yes	Yes
Jobber Tag & Cancelled Status Sync	—	Yes	Yes
HubSpot Custom Property & Webhook Sync	—	—	Yes
Multi-Location Custom Exclusion Rules	—	—	Yes

Note: All features can be tested during your free 14-day trial.

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Next Steps

• Review Your Integration Settings: If you are using Jobber or HubSpot, check your integration mapping page in SoTrustworthy to verify which tags or status fields trigger an exclusion.
• Set Your Throttling Window: Go to Settings > Sequence Rules in your dashboard to adjust the default number of days (e.g., 90 days) the system must wait before allowing another review request to the same contact.
• Train Your Team: Instruct field techs and office administrators on how to apply "Skip Review" tags in your CRM whenever an active customer service issue arises on a job site.