Configure simple automations to help manage responses to public reviews of your brand.
Use cases
Many brands are committed to responding to public reviews to acknowledge feedback and help clients feel seen and heard. Depending on your situation, keeping up with a steady stream of reviews can present significant challenges—following are a few situations where automatic review responses can help.
Enabling teams to handle the most problematic feedback
Public reviews can range in complexity from a simple "5-stars" without further comment to a 1-star rating with detailed list of highly contextual complaints. Creating simple rules and templates to address low-stakes positive reviews can free up your team to focus on reviews that require greater finesse and human judgment.
Ensuring backups for a timely response
Some organizations have specific expectations for timely review responses, for example that teams should respond to each public review within a certain number of days. Automatic review responses can be a helpful backup option for the days and times when your team doesn't have time to meet this demand.
Setup guide
1. Determine your automation strategy
Responding to public reviews with automation involves two components: message templates and rules for when to apply them. For example, you might have one rule that schedules automatic responses to reviews that received 5-stars, and another rule that responds to 1- and 2-star reviews.
Each rule can draw from a pool of templates that will be randomly selected, to help automated responses feel more natural and varied.
Once you've decided how you'd like to handle different review situations, you can create templates to support each one.
2. Create automation templates
Under Review > Responses > Response Templates, select New Template.
Give your template a name and choose the scope. For organizations with multiple centrally managed brands, Global template must be selected to make a template eligible for automated responses.
Next add the response text. You can also use variables to customize the template to the responding brand or location. You can create as many templates as you'd like. It's helpful to give your templates names that make their purpose clear, such as "5-Star Reply A", "5-Star Reply B", etc.
How are reply templates and rules managed across my organization?
Automated responses are generally managed centrally at the highest level of the organization.
For multi-brand enterprise customers:
- Only enterprise admin users can create global response templates and automation rules that use them.
- Brand-level users can create local response templates for their brand, but these are only available for manual responses.
For locally-managed or single-brand organizations:
- Company admins can create templates and automation rules that apply to their brand only.
For all organizations:
- Individual locations can be opted in or out of automatic review responses. Locations cannot have separate automation rules or templates.
3. Create automation rules
Under Review > Responses > Automation Rules, select New Rule. Give your rule a name.
Select the Review Conditions you'd like the apply (for example, 5 stars only, 1-2 stars, 4-5 stars). Note that overlapping rules are not allowed—for example, if you have one rule that applies to 5-star reviews, you cannot make a second rule that applies to both 4- and 5-star reviews.
Next, choose which templates will be used to respond to public reviews that match these conditions. Replies will be selected randomly from the list you create.
Define a delay for processing the automation rule. Please note that automation delays are calculated from the time your public reviews are synced to Swell.
Don't see Automation Rules?
This feature may not be enabled for your organization. Please contact your Customer Success Manager if you'd like to enable this feature.
4. (Optional) Include or exclude specific locations
In the Rules > Settings tab, you can choose to apply your automation rules to all locations or specify a list of locations to include or exclude.
5. Enable your rules
When your templates and automations are ready, toggle each rule from Inactive to Active. Rules will immediately begin applying to newly received reviews according to your settings.
Interacting with automated review responses
When a review is received that meets the conditions for one of your rules, the automation will schedule a reply according to the delay you have configured. You can view these scheduled auto-replies listed under any reviews they apply to under Review > All Reviews. The rule that triggered the automation is also listed. If you have a large volume of reviews, filtering by Response: Scheduled can help you find any scheduled auto-responses.
Canceling and overriding auto-replies
Any user with access to the Reviews feed can cancel scheduled auto-replies before they are sent. Leaving a manual reply will cancel any previously scheduled automatic reply. Automated replies can also be deleted or updated manually after they have been posted using the Change Reply or Delete buttons.