One of Olo Sentiment’s key benefits to restaurants is saving time by automating recurring tasks. One way in which this can be done is through Auto Respond in Reviews. This feature allows brands to automatically respond to guest reviews based on predefined criteria using pre-approved content.
Skip To:
- Best Practices
- Creating Template Libraries
- Creating an Auto Respond Rule
- Launching Auto Respond
- Viewing Reviews with Auto Respond
- Frequently Asked Questions
Auto Respond Best Practices
Olo Sentiment offers multiple complementary ways to reduce the amount of time spent responding to guest reviews. For the Auto Respond feature in particular, it is recommended that it be used only for no-text reviews because no-text reviews are more likely to align with pre-made templates.
Other best practices include:
- Configure separate rules for different sentiments to ensure templates resonate more accurately with review
- Exclude Yelp–it does not allow for no-text reviews from users and may remove responses it suspects are auto-generated
- Pair the use of Auto Respond with other features like Bulk Responses and AI Suggested Responses to balance scalability with personalization
Creating Template Libraries
The first step is to create a Response Template Library for each rule you plan to implement. These generally are grouped into buckets such as:
- 1-2 star reviews with no text
- 4-5 star reviews with no text
You can view a deep dive on how to configure these generally in our Review Response Tools: Response Template Libraries help center article. What is important to consider in the context of Auto Respond is to create multiple templates per theme. The variety of templates is critical to making the responses feel more authentic to guests, as opposed to the exact same response being used every time.
For example, you could have templates for 4-5 star reviews with no text like the below:
- It's such a great feeling to know that we left you with such a remarkable impression of {%Location Name}. We're overjoyed to see your rating and truly thank you for sharing!
- Hi {%AuthorName}, thank you for posting your positive review. Our team here at **business_name** is committed to providing high-quality customer service, and we’re thrilled to hear that we made a good impression on you. We hope you’ll visit us again soon.
- Hi {%AuthorName} thanks for reviewing us! We're happy to know that you've had a great experience and look forward to seeing you again soon!
While there is no exact number to target, we generally recommend creating 10+ templates per theme.
Creating an Auto Respond Rule
After configuring the Response Template Libraries, you can create the rules that will be used to automatically respond to reviews. You can view a deep dive on how to configure these generally in our Review Rules help center article.
In the context of Auto Respond, there are two especially important callouts.
Filters - Review Content
Click the Reviews without Text radio button to ensure Auto Respond does not reply to reviews with text.
Actions - Auto Respond
Select the Auto Respond checkbox and then select the specific Response Library (or multiple) that you created for the applicable theme. In this fictional example, we are selecting a library specifically built for 5 star reviews.
This is also a good time to double check the rest of the Review Rule was configured to match the Response Library. For example, when setting up the Review Content filter above, we forgot to change the Rating filter. It should look like this:
Launching Auto Respond
When done reviewing your configuration, click the Create button in the bottom right corner. From this moment onward, new reviews that come in will be evaluated based on all rule criteria.
If a review meets this criteria outlined above, an automatic reply will be generated from a random template within the associated library or libraries. The more templates added to a rule, the more varied the responses.
Viewing Reviews with Auto Respond
To view all reviews that have been responded to via Auto Respond, first navigate to Reviews > Inbox > All Reviews.
Then select Auto Responded from the Response Status filter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Auto Respond use AI Suggested Responses?
The two are separate, complementary features. Auto Respond leverages pre-approved templates to reply to reviews, while AI Suggested Responses uses GenAI to quickly recommend a response to a particular review.
Can AI Suggested Responses automatically respond to a review?
An Olo Sentiment user must approve an AI Suggested Response before it is posted.
What if a guest review matches more than one rule?
The rule with the highest priority will always execute and the others will not. If your Auto Respond is not responding to reviews as expected, this is one potential reason.
Does Auto Respond always respond to reviews immediately?
There is a randomized delay between 15 minutes and an hour before the response is posted.