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 brands have specific commitments for timely review responses, e.g. expecting their teams to respond to each public review engagement within a day. 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
This feature is only available to Enterprise administrators in Swell.
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 creates 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 > Automated Responses > Automation Templates, select New Template.
Give your template a name and add the response text. You can also use variables to personalize the template. You can create as many templates as you'd like.
Tip: It's helpful to give your templates names that make their purpose clear, such as "5-Star Review 1," 5-Star Review 2," etc.
3. Create automation rules
Under Review > Automated Responses > Rules, select New Rule. Give your rule a name.
Select the Review Conditions you'd like the apply (e.g. 5 stars only, 1-2 stars, 4-5 stars).
Select templates that should be used to respond to public reviews that match these conditions. Templates 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.
Note: To avoid confusion, Swell will not allow you to create rules with overlapping criteria. 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.
4. Enable your rules
When your templates and rule(s) are configured, toggle each rule from Inactive to Active. Rules will immediately begin applying to newly received reviews.
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 Swell user with access to the Reviews feed can cancel scheduled auto-replies before they are sent. Leaving a custom 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.