Replying to Reviews Automatically

Before you start

Auto-reply writes replies in your brand voice and either sends them or emails them to you first. Everything starts switched off, and nothing is ever published for a rating you have not explicitly chosen.

Set your brand voice first. Auto-reply uses the same settings, and the default voice is generic.

Which reviews

Four presets cover most cases: only 5 star, 4 and 5 star, everything except 1 and 2 star, or all reviews. There is also Choose for each rating, which lets you set each rating separately, so you can send 5-star replies automatically and hold 1-star ones for approval.

Per rating you have three choices:

• Don't reply. Auto-reply ignores it entirely.
• Draft for my approval. A reply is written and emailed to you. Nothing is published until you click.
• Send automatically. The reply is published with nobody reading it first.

The sensible default is to draft for approval on anything below 4 stars. An automated reply to an angry customer is the single easiest way to make a bad review worse.

The safety net for low ratings

If you turn on automatic sending for 1 and 2 star reviews, you are asked to write your own short replies for them, up to 300 characters each. Those are used verbatim instead of an AI-written reply. It is a deliberate friction: if you want a robot answering your angriest customers, you write what it says.

Where

Choose the platforms auto-reply covers. Platforms we cannot publish replies to are shown but cannot be selected, because a reply that never reaches the customer is worse than no reply. You can still answer those yourself in Dinopix. See which platforms accept published replies.

When

• Wait before replying. Immediately, 15 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, 1 day or 2 days. A short delay is worth setting. An instant reply reads as automated even when the wording is good.
• Quiet hours. A from and until time in a timezone you choose. Replies wait until the window opens.
• Most replies per day. A cap that limits the damage if something is misconfigured or a sync imports a large backlog at once.
• Only reply to reviews with written feedback. Skips star-only ratings, where there is nothing to respond to.

If you run several businesses

Settings are per business. Once one is set up the way you want, you can copy that policy to your other businesses rather than repeating the work. Read what you are copying first: it carries the automatic-send choices with it.

Checking it is working

The Auto-reply activity tab lists what was drafted, what was sent, and what was skipped with a reason. If you manage several businesses, the overview there shows which ones have auto-reply on and flags any that are failing.