Step 4: Set Up Response Templates and Workflows

Now that you have a base understanding of the available review response tools at your disposal and have created a review response strategy, it’s time to set up the templates and workflows needed to execute your strategy.

Set up Response Assets and Instructions

Set up Assets for Automatic Review Response

Add response templates to use for your automatic response workflows. You can add templates while setting up the workflows or set them up separately from workflows, especially if you want your marketing team to review them to ensure they meet brand guidelines.

Follow Add a Text Asset for step-by-step instructions. Be sure to select Reviews > Review Response for the usage.

Set up Assets for Templated Review Response

Create text assets for the four components of an effective review response: greeting, value statement, sentiment keywords, and closing. Then piece together a review response by selecting an option for each component, which dynamically updates based on the review content using embedded fields . This streamlines responding manually by allowing you to choose the best pre-written templates.

Follow Create Assets for Templated Review Response for step-by-step instructions and see the Templated Review Response units for best practices on crafting the components.

(Optional) Set up Instructions for Generative Response

While our system can generate responses without instruction, optionally add instructions to guide the generative model in crafting responses that align with your brand’s voice, including tone, greeting, sign-off, and length preferences. You can also highlight specific details to reference from the review, such as “If the review specifies complaints, politely acknowledge and quickly restate the complaints.”

Instructions are created on an account level, and the same instructions will be provided to all reviews in your account. However, once you generate a response manually or through a workflow rule, you can request the AI model to make custom edits, such as changing the tone or length.

Follow the Create Instructions for Generative Review Response help article for step-by-step instructions. See the Introduction to Generative Review Response unit for more information on what instructions you can add.

Set Up Workflows

Now, combine the strategy you put together and all the setup you did with labels, users, and templates to set up workflows. Adding workflows follows the same process, no matter the reply type you use. Follow the Create Workflow Rules for Review Response help article for step-by-step instructions.

Note: If you have a decentralized team, you may need to add additional workflows to assign tasks to specific users or teams. If you manage reviews individually or as a small team, you may skip assigning tasks to specific users and rely on a shared task inbox.

Each workflow rule will check incoming reviews for specified criteria. You can use the labels you set up in the previous step and/or add other criteria, such as whether reviews have content or their star rating. If the review meets the requirements, the workflow will create a task and assign it to the specified user or user group based on the type of reply, discussed in the Workflow Reply Types section.

Thus, you must set up a separate workflow rule for each criterion-action combination. Additionally, automatic responses will choose from the templates you specify, so you’ll want to set up separate rules for each group of response templates you’ll use.

Note: Workflows are prioritized based on date of creation. If a review meets the criteria for multiple workflows, only the oldest will be applied to that review.

Workflows Example

Using our recommendations from step one, set up four types of workflow rules using the approach below. Remember that for Reviews with Content, you can use Generative Review Response or respond manually. This is an example of how you could vary your approach.

Let’s break this down:

• Reviews with No Content: Since this can be automated, set up two workflow rules, one for positive and one for negative ratings, each with 10 templates your team wrote. The workflows respond to these reviews as they come in, choosing one of the templates randomly, without needing your team’s ongoing input.
  
• Reviews with Content (Positive): Since these reviews are the lowest priority to respond to, you don’t set up any workflow rules. You can always go to the Reviews > Response tab if you have extra time to address these (to save time, you use an AI-generated response or template as a starting point), but otherwise, the highest priority responses are in your Inbox.
  
• Reviews with Negative Keywords: Here are the highest priority responses needed. You set these up with manual replies since these could need immediate and personalized attention. Navigate to your Tasks Inbox and filter for “Type = Review Response” to quickly see these.
  
• Reviews with Content (Negative): You want to respond to as many negative reviews as you can, but these aren’t necessarily urgent. You set up a Generative Review Response workflow so you can quickly review, edit, and approve AI-generated responses. Navigate to your Tasks Inbox and filter for “Type = Review Response Approval” to quickly see these.
  
  • Note: Ensure that the workflow rule for Reviews with Negative Keywords is placed before the one for Reviews with Content (Negative) so that it is executed first.

Centralized vs. Decentralized Team

Suppose you have one centralized team, or just one person, responding to reviews. You may not need to set assignees in the workflows above because everyone on the team is empowered to tackle tasks as they have the capacity. It doesn’t matter who gets to it first, as the work is shared and not assigned to any single individual.

A decentralized team may have different teams or users respond to different types of reviews, or different people are responsible for different entities, or may use an approval workflow so that different people write responses and others review them before they are published.

In this case, how you set up your users and permissions is crucial. As mentioned in the last step, the two key pieces to access are scope and role. Scope determines which entities users can act on. If you have already granted permissions so that the right users have access to the right entities, you may decide to skip adding workflows that assign manual response tasks, since the only difference is where they’ll go in platform to respond (a task shows up in the Inbox, but reviews that need a response are in the Reviews Response tab). However, if multiple users have access to the same entity and you want to assign the task to a specific user, that is when you’d create a workflow.

Then the role dictates what action a user can take on the entity they’re assigned. If they can respond to a review directly, they’ll respond, and they’re done. If they can only suggest a response, the approvals workflow will direct that response to the approver.