Automated review replies allow you to configure replies tailored to specific situations, like 5-star reviews from Google to be automatically sent upon receiving a review that matches a specified set of criteria. This is very helpful for keeping up with responding to reviews without having to manually write an individual response for each one. 


Before you set up automated review replies, you need to have at least one response template set up in your account. You should have several by default, but you can edit them or add new ones if you want to use specific language in your automated review replies. 


Once you have at least one response template that you want to use for your automated review replies, you are ready to get started with setup. 

Setting up Automated Review Replies

To set up automated review replies, first click on the settings gear icon in the upper right area of the Consumer Fusion dashboard. 



Then, from the settings menu click on the option for Automated Review Replies in the list of options on the left. 



From here, you can set up a new rule for automated review replies, or view any existing rules that are set up for your account.


Setting up a New Rule for Automated Review Replies


To set up a new rule, click on the “+ Add New Rule” button. 



General Rule Setup

The next step is to name the rule, and select the conditions that we want the rule to be based on. This includes selecting the directory and conditions that should trigger the rule to apply. 



The different options for general rule setup are: 

  • Directory: the directory (example: Google or Facebook) that the rule will apply to. The only two options for now are Google and Facebook. 

  • Condition: The logic that will apply for this rule (example: equal to). 

  • Rating: The field that the condition is applied to (example: 1 Star)

  • Delay: The amount of time between the rule being triggered and the automated reply being published (example: 24 hours). This can be helpful to give your team a chance to manually respond first, and if they don’t then the auto response will be posted. 

  • Skip reply if review has no text: If this box is checked, replies will not be posted for reviews that only have a rating but no text. 

  • Skip non english reviews: If this box is checked, reviews that are posted in languages other than English will not receive an automated reply. 

  • Enable this rule: If this box is checked, the rule will be enabled upon completion of the setup process. 


Select Locations

If your business has more than one location under your parent account on Consumer Fusion, you can select which locations to apply this rule to. In this example, we have selected one of two available locations in our account to apply this rule to. 



If you have Business Groups configured for sets of locations, you can also select them using the dropdown on the upper right side of the page. 


General Rule Templates

These templates will apply to any review that meets the criteria for this rule that do not match any of the more specific criteria that other templates you select will cover (like reviews without text or templates for keyword sentiment). These templates can be set up under the Response Templates page in the Settings page of the dashboard. 


We recommend setting up several templates per rule so (10 templates per rule is a good rule of thumb) so that a variety of responses are posted.




Template Reviews w/o Text (Optional)

These templates will be used in cases where reviews have a rating that matches the rule but no review text. 



Template for Keyword Sentiment (Optional)

This option allows you to use specific templates whenever a keyword or cluster of keywords is detected in the review text. To set this up, first click on the “+ Create Keyword Cluster” button. 



From here, you will be able to set a cluster name and select keywords to target for that cluster. In this example, we chose keywords that contained the words “business” “our business” or “my business” 



Once you have added a cluster name and selected keywords to target, you can select which of your templates should be used in these cases. 




After you complete this step and click the “Add” button, your keyword sentiment cluster will now appear with the option to edit or delete it. 


The final step is to review the template rules that you have just configured for this rule. Once you have reviewed the rules and confirmed that they match your intended setup, click the “Save” button at the bottom of the page to save your new automated response rule. 


You will be redirected back to the Automated Review Replies page, where you will see your new rule that you have just set up. There are options to edit or delete the rule, as well as to enable or disable it. 




One thing to note is that you cannot have multiple overlapping rules with the same criteria (the same directory, rule, and star rating for instance), because they would conflict with one another. Otherwise, you are free to set up as many rules as desired to cover the different cases that you want to configure automated review responses for.