Follow up pending Bark responses and ask hired customers for reviews

1. Click My Responses in the Bark top navigation and open the Pending tab, which holds every lead you contacted but have not converted.
2. Open each Bark lead, check your notes and the estimate you sent, then use Send email or Send SMS; Bark's help suggests spacing follow-ups across channels and times rather than repeating one message.
3. When a customer says yes, set the lead status to Hired in My Responses, which is what makes the option to send that customer a review invitation appear.
4. Bark's help points professionals to a CRM integration under Settings > Integrations for follow-up reminders, so without one the follow-up schedule lives in your head and won jobs often stay in Pending with no review request.

Go through my Bark Pending responses from the last 14 days, text anyone I have not chased in 3 days with my "Follow-up" SMS template, and send a review invite to anyone who hired me.

1. 01

   Build the chase list

   list_responses with status pending and a since date covers the window you set. The agent reads your notes and drops leads you chased recently, leads where you wrote that the customer declined, and anything older than your cutoff.

2. 02

   Switch channel for each touch

   get_response shows what already went out. If the first contact was an email, the follow-up goes by SMS from your saved template, and the other way round. Consumer leads are messaged in the evening or at the weekend, business leads in office hours.

3. 03

   Stop after a fixed number of touches

   After your limit (two follow-ups by default) with no reply, the agent stops messaging and proposes archiving through update_response_status, which you approve. It never sends two messages to one customer on the same day, and it logs each touch with add_note.

4. 04

   Close won jobs properly

   When a note or reply says the customer hired you, the agent sets the lead to Hired and then calls request_review. A lead the customer already marked Hired goes straight to the review invitation.

5. 05

   Separate dead contacts from quiet ones

   A bounced email or unreachable number is not a follow-up job. The agent lists those leads with their purchase date, so you can still file a credit return while Bark accepts one.

Pending responses since 28 Sep: 11. Followed up today: 4, after your OK.
Jordan (Wedding Photography, Leeds): SMS from template "Follow-up", second touch.
Priya (Web Design, Salford): email, first follow-up since the quote on 7 Oct.
Sam (Kitchen Fitting, Bristol): marked Hired, review invitation sent.
Archive proposed: 2 leads with two follow-ups and no reply.
Lead 61812044: email bounced, bought 3 Oct, 5 days left to request a credit return.

• Either the professional or the customer can mark a Bark lead Hired, and Bark offers the review invitation only once the status is Hired.
• Bark does not return credits when a customer stops replying or hires someone else, so a quiet lead in Pending is a sunk cost that only a follow-up can recover.
• Bark says even a single 5-star review makes a professional 3x more likely to be hired than one with no reviews.
• The Bark integration on Zapier runs one-way only, so a status or note changed in a CRM never flows back into My Responses.

send_message, update_response_status and request_review ask for your OK by default. To run it weekly without you, switch confirmation off for those tools in your dashboard.

Sources: Bark Help: Managing your leads dashboard · Bark Help: Adding reviews to your Bark profile · Bark Help: Understanding and handling unresponsive leads · Bark Help: Lead quality issues: when a lead goes quiet

curl https://cotlet.dev/api/v1/bark/send_message \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $COTLET_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"lead_id":"61842207","channel":"sms","template":"Follow-up"}'

{
  "lead_id": "61842207",
  "channel": "sms",
  "sent": true
}

MCP: add https://cotlet.dev/mcp/v1 with the same key; the tool is bark_send_message. Example data.

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