Follow-Up Automation Checklist for Trades Businesses in Australia
Automating customer follow-up in a trades business means your Google review requests, job completion messages, and repeat-job reminders go out reliably — without anyone on your team tracking it manually. This checklist covers the full setup: platform configuration, message sequences, data requirements, and the testing steps that most guides skip entirely.
Most Australian trades businesses lose review volume and repeat business not because their customers are unhappy, but because follow-up never happens. A completed job without a follow-up is a missed review, a missed referral, and a missed repeat booking. The average trades business that implements this setup sees its Google review count increase 30–50% within 90 days, without any advertising spend.
The checklist works for businesses using ServiceM8, Tradify, or GoHighLevel — the three platforms most commonly used by Australian trades businesses for this workflow.
Why setup order matters
The most common mistake is building the follow-up sequences before the customer data is clean. Send automated messages to bad mobile numbers, you look unprofessional. Send them to the previous owner's personal contacts who weren't actually customers of the business, you create confusion and potentially a complaint.
A landscaping business I looked at recently had 340 contacts in their system — mobile numbers collected over eight years. When we audited the data before migration, about 80 were landlines, 40 were duplicates, and 15 were suppliers rather than customers. That's 40% unusable. Running an automation sequence on that list would have wasted send credits and possibly annoyed people who weren't clients.
The right sequence is: audit the data, configure the platform, build the sequences, test on a handful of real jobs, then roll out. This checklist follows that order.
For the complete guide to the strategy behind each element — why the timing matters, which message formats get the best response rates, and what to expect in the first 90 days — see the full guide to automating customer follow-up. This checklist is the implementation companion to that article.
What this checklist covers
The full checklist walks through five phases:
Phase 1 — Data audit: Cleaning your contact database before any sequences go live. This is the step that determines whether your automation helps or hurts.
Phase 2 — Platform setup: Configuring ServiceM8, Tradify, or GoHighLevel with the right job stages, trigger points, and integrations (Xero, SMS provider, Google Business Profile).
Phase 3 — Review request sequence: Setting up the job-completion-triggered review request — timing, message copy, direct link configuration, and the one-vs-two message decision.
Phase 4 — Job completion follow-up: The broader post-job sequence including the transition message for new owners, the satisfaction check-in, and the handover from manual to automated communication.
Phase 5 — Repeat-job reminders: Setting up service cycle reminders for applicable trades — pest control, HVAC, pool and spa, gutter cleaning — including the interval configuration and opt-out handling.
This pairs with the quoting automation checklist (front-end of the customer journey) to give you a complete automation setup for the full job lifecycle. If you're still in the planning stage of what to implement first, the AI implementation roadmap covers the sequencing across all automation types.
This is Module 8 material from the Playbook — the operational systems and AI implementation module for the post-acquisition period.
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