Step 2: Build a Review Response Strategy

Use Yext’s review response tools to efficiently manage customer feedback while reducing manual work and increasing response rates. Below, we’ll provide an overview of review response best practices and tools to strategize your approach.

Review Response Best Practices

Target responding to at least 50% of reviews on the key publishers (Google, Yelp, Facebook, first-party, TripAdvisor, Trustpilot). Once you have created an effective program, your goal should be to increase your response rate until you respond to all or nearly all reviews.

Prioritize responding to reviews in this order:

1. Reviews with three or fewer stars should be your first priority. Reviews with lower star ratings typically include complaints that customers expect to be responded to. For these, you should “hug your haters” — address the complaints and try to win back your customer.
   
2. 4- and 5-star reviews with significant content should be your next priority. You want to “fire up your fans” — thank them for pointing out the great things about your brand and keep them coming back for more.
   
3. 4- and 5-star reviews with minimal or no content should be the last priority and only be responded to if your goal is to respond to every review. However, as we’ll get to it shortly, these can be handled automatically with a bit of setup from you.

When crafting your review response, be thoughtful, helpful, and respectful. Responding to reviews shows that customers, other customers, and potential customers that you care.

Available Review Response Tools

When you go to respond to a review, you don’t have to write the response yourself (although you can if you want)! You have access to all of our review response tools:

• Generative Review Response: Use AI to generate a response that you can edit freeform or ask the AI model to edit with specific feedback.
  
• Response templates: Create pre-approved response templates to use as-is or as a starting point for editing. There are two types of templates:
  
  • Review response assets: Templates for a complete response.
    
  • Templated review response: Templates for each component of a response (greeting, statement, sentiment, and closing) that can be assembled to create a complete response.
    
  • Review response assets are best for quick, automatic replies to simple reviews, while templated review responses are ideal for crafting personalized messages by mixing and matching components.
    
• Freeform: Of course, you can write the response yourself as well.

Workflow Reply Types

While you can respond to reviews manually, use workflows to assign each incoming review a task based on the way you want to respond, corresponding with the response tools above:

• Generative reply: generates a response and creates a task to approve the response
  
• Automatic reply: automatically responds to the review using one of the pre-defined review response assets you specify (Automatic Review Response)
  
• Manual reply: assigns the task of responding to the review to the specified user, who can then use any of the response tools to respond

Recommended Strategy

Build out a strategy that uses specific response tools for specific types of reviews. The table below summarizes our recommended approach to your review response strategy.

Your organization’s structure dictates your review strategy. Individuals and small teams have simpler workflows. Decentralized teams, where different teams or users will respond to different reviews depending on the entity or content of the review, need additional workflows to split work or set up approvals. Everyone should use Automatic Review Response to automate responses for reviews with no content, reducing workload.

Remember that these are just suggestions; customize this strategy to fit your brand. If you customize your plan, create a table similar to this to easily see it at a high level and ensure you’ve covered everything. It’ll also help you stay organized as you implement your strategy.

Reviews with No Content: Reviews without content don’t give you much to respond to besides a star rating. Use Automatic Review Response to respond automatically. Define multiple message templates per star rating band and workflows to choose one randomly to respond with. This ensures responses meet brand guidelines and offers variability to make them more natural. Pull in dynamic content, such as the reviewer’s name or the location they visited, to personalize responses by embedding fields .

Reviews with Content: Addressing specific feedback makes reviewers feel heard. Generative Review Response uses AI to draft tailored responses, saving time and manual work. These responses require human approval before publishing and can be used manually or in workflows. If you do not want to use AI-generated responses, respond manually, with access to all response tools, such as generative responses or pre-written templates.

Reviews with Negative Keywords: Negative reviews, particularly those with keywords like “damage,” “broken,” or “food poisoning,” may require immediate attention. Choose a different workflow from Reviews with Content to route these to the appropriate teams (customer support, location manager, marketing, or legal) for prompt action.

Now that you know which review response tools you can access and when to use them, let’s set up your account to implement them!