Note: SimpleConnect is currently in Beta, and we're not adding more stores at this time. Watch the What's New section at the top of SimpleConsign for updates on availability.
Applies to: SimpleConsign accounts with the SimpleConnect add-on. US customers only.
Reputation Management brings the reviews you collect across multiple public platforms into one dashboard inside SimpleConnect. From there you can manage them, respond automatically or by hand, and send emails prompting customers and consignors to leave a review for your business.
You will find it in SimpleConnect under Reputation Management, where there are two modules: Reviews and AI-Powered Feedback.
Video walkthrough
In this article
- What it does and does not do
- Start in Settings
- Automatic responses
- Response triggers and advanced settings
- The review request email
- Connecting Google, Facebook, and Yelp
- Promoting social media reviews
- Review frequency, timing, and follow-up
- Sharing your reviews and your review form
- The SMS review request
- Notifications
- The Reviews dashboard
- Working your review list
- AI-Powered Feedback
- Troubleshooting
What it does and does not do
This is worth being clear about before you start.
Reputation Management pulls your reviews in so you can see and manage everything in one place, and it can generate responses that go out to the reviewer by email.
It does not post anything to Google, Facebook, or Yelp on your behalf, and it does not respond to reviews on those platforms. If you receive a negative review directly on Google, Facebook, or Yelp and you want to dispute it or post a public reply on that platform, you still need to go to that platform and do it there.
What you get here is one dashboard for monitoring your reputation across everything you have connected, and one place to see what your overall review score is doing.
Start in Settings
Settings is the most important step when you first access the platform, and it is where you will spend your setup time. There is nothing to manage on the dashboard until reviews start coming in, and reviews will not come in until you have configured this.
A good order to work through:
- Decide how you want responses handled, automatic or manual.
- Customize the review request email.
- Connect Google, Facebook, and Yelp if you use them.
- Set your review frequency, timing, and follow-up.
- Add notification recipients.
Automatic responses
There are two ways to have responses go out automatically, and you can also skip both and respond by hand.
The AI agent
If you want the AI agent to respond automatically to inbound reviews, enable the feature and choose your personality and tone. It generates the message for you, and you can still modify that messaging if you want to adjust it.
Your own templates
If you would rather not use the AI agent, type your own automated responses instead. You set up two:
- A positive reviews template, which goes to four and five star reviews
- A negative reviews template, which goes to three star and lower
Depending on the sentiment of the review coming in, the system sends the matching response to the reviewer by email, using whatever you typed into that box.
Response triggers and advanced settings
Response triggers control which reviews get an automatic response:
- All positive reviews, meaning four and five stars
- All negative reviews, meaning the lower star ratings
- Reviews mentioning specific keywords. Less commonly used. If there are general words your clients and consignors often use when leaving a review, enter them here and separate multiple keywords with a comma.
To the right are advanced settings.
Response delay in minutes. How long the system waits after a review arrives before the automatic response is triggered and delivered. You could set 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever you prefer.
The recommendation is to set this a little higher rather than lower. A longer delay means that if you are monitoring reviews, you get the chance to look at one before the automatic response goes out.
Max response length in characters. Defaults to 500, which suits the short responses most stores want to send. You can increase the limit if you need to.
Business contact information to include. Add the details you want on the response, such as a specific email address for the manager or the location, and a phone number in case someone needs to call you about an issue.
Save your configuration when you are finished with any of these.
The review request email
The default email template is where you customize the outbound email that asks for a review. It arrives with example wording along the lines of "Thank you for choosing" and your business name.
You can leave the example as it is if you are happy with it, or rewrite the message to fit your business.
Before you rely on it, send yourself a test. Enter your own email address and hit send, and you will receive exactly what a customer or consignor receives, so you can check it yourself.
Save changes whenever you modify it.
Connecting Google, Facebook, and Yelp
Linking your outside platforms is what lets you manage all of your reviews in one place.
You need to be the admin of your business Facebook page. Log in, and once you are logged in as admin you will be prompted to answer a couple of questions allowing the system to pull reviews.
Same requirement. You need to be the admin of your Google business page with the associated email address. Log in and connect with Google.
Yelp
Simply enter your Yelp URL.
You are not required to connect all three. Connect the platforms that matter to your business.
Promoting social media reviews
This setting is worth understanding, because it is how you turn one review into two.
The system sends an outbound email prompting for a review, and that review comes in through your own general review form. If you set promote social media reviews to yes, then when a customer or consignor leaves a four or five star review on that form, they get a prompt afterward offering to post it somewhere else as well.
They see a small pop-up saying their review has been copied and asking whether they would also like to leave it on an additional platform. If you have connected Google, Facebook, or Yelp, they can click through and post it there too.
One limitation to be aware of. To post to another platform they have to be a user of it: a Facebook user, a Gmail address for Google, or a Yelp user. Your general review form is open to anyone, so customers with a Yahoo, Hotmail, or Outlook address can always leave you a review. They just will not be able to take the extra step to a platform they do not have an account on.
Review frequency, timing, and follow-up
Three settings control how often people are asked and when.
Review frequency. Choose only once after first checkout, after every checkout, or set a custom frequency such as quarterly.
Request a review after checkout. Choose immediately, one day later, or two days later.
Review follow-up day. If the customer or consignor has not left a review after that initial request, the system can send one reminder by email. Choose 24 hours after the initial send, three days, or seven days.
You can change any of these at any time.
Sharing your reviews and your review form
Two link options sit further down in Settings.
Embed your reviews
If you want a dedicated page on your website where people can read your reviews, or you want to make a social post along the lines of "Check out what our consignors and customers are saying about us," this gives you a URL to a page.
Choose with replies or without replies. If you have been responding to reviews and want to show that publicly, use with replies. If you want a straightforward read-only page of your inbound reviews, use without replies.
The page carries your logo and the information from your CRM setup, including contact information and your hours, alongside the reviews themselves.
Leave a Review
This gives you the URL to the review form itself. Use it when you want to send a one-off text or email on your own, or post a leave-a-review link on your website.
The form carries your logo and information and is deliberately simple. It asks for the reviewer's name, email address, and star rating, gives them a box to type in, and finishes with a CAPTCHA verification.
The SMS review request
You can also have the system generate a text message asking for a review. Type your message in the default SMS template, and you can preview what the text will look like.
You do not need to include the link. The leave-a-review link is added to the end of the message automatically on your behalf.
Notifications
If you would rather not log in constantly to see what has come in, add a notification recipient.
Enter an email address and choose whether that person receives an email every time a review comes in or only for three stars or lower. Click Add when finished.
From then on, every new review matching that criteria triggers an admin email letting you know, including the review information, so you can read it in your inbox.
The Reviews dashboard
The dashboard opens first when you enter the Reviews module. Once you have Google, Facebook, Yelp, or your general reviews connected and syncing, it tracks your rating across all of those platforms and shows:
- Your percentage of positive reviews
- Your average response time, whether responses are automated or sent by hand
- Your growth in reviews and reputation for the month against last month
- Your response rate, meaning how many reviews you have replied to
- An approved and disapproved count over the last 12 months
- A 12 month rating history broken down by five, four, three, two, and one star
- Tags, meaning particular words customers use when leaving reviews
- Images customers attached to Google and Yelp reviews
- Sentiment analysis, showing positive, neutral, and negative
Hover over any of the graphs to see the underlying detail.
Working your review list
Incoming reviews land in the List area. Across the top it tracks your total reviews with star rating, your average rating, whether you are up or down from the prior month, approved and disapproved totals, your average Google rating, and sentiment analysis.
Finding a review
Search by a customer's name, or use the advanced search to filter by description, date range, reviewer, source, or star rating.
What each review shows
- Reviewer name
- The review that was typed in
- Your response, whether automatic or sent by hand
- Any tags found in the review
- Star rating
- Review date and time
- Status
- Source, showing where it came from
A review that has not yet been analyzed shows a pending analysis status.
Reviews are stored in chronological order by last received, and they stay stored unless you delete them.
Approved and disapproved
This controls one thing: whether a review appears on the public URL you took from Settings and posted on your website or social media.
Leave a review approved and it displays there. Mark it disapproved and it will not display, though it stays stored in your CRM.
This does not change anything on Google, Facebook, or Yelp. It only controls what you choose to showcase.
Other actions
- Delete. Useful for a spam review or a duplicate. Everything else stays stored by default.
- View. Opens the review in full on its own page.
- Notes. Internal only. Use them to record that you responded, that someone was unhappy, or that you owe them a follow-up.
- Post Response. This is how you respond by hand. The system reads the email address associated with wherever the review came from. Type your subject line and your customized message, then send.
AI-Powered Feedback
The second module under Reputation Management tracks feedback and sentiment analysis using an AI tool built into the system.
Performance snapshot
At the top you get your percentage of sentiment split across positive, neutral, and negative, the number of AI responses sent if you have that enabled, your average response time, and a satisfaction score.
Individual sentiment and response approval
Below that you can see the sentiment analysis for each review once the AI agent has analyzed it.
This is also where the AI responder holds things back for you. If you have automatic AI responses enabled and a review comes in as neutral or negative, the generated response comes here for your review before sending. You can edit the response, then approve and send it.
That is a useful safety net. It means the AI can handle your positive reviews on its own while anything sensitive still passes a human first.
Sentiment trends and settings
Sentiment trends track positive, neutral, and negative over time based on the tool reading your reviews.
Your AI response settings include auto-respond to positive feedback, manager review for neutral, and an instant response option if you want it to respond in under five minutes.
Most mentioned terms
The module also surfaces the terms coming up most often in client feedback, such as friendly staff, convenient location, relaxing, professional, or clean. The AI agent reads those and scores them, which tells you what people actually value about your store.
Troubleshooting
I connected Google but I am not seeing my reviews
The connection has to be authorized by the admin of the Google business page, using the associated email address. Someone without admin rights cannot complete it.
Do customers see my notes?
No, notes on a review are internal only.
If I disapprove a review, does it come off Google?
No. Approved and disapproved only controls whether a review shows on the public URL you generated here. Reviews on Google, Facebook, and Yelp stay where they are.
How do I reply publicly to a Google review?
Go to Google directly. Responses posted from this platform go to the reviewer by email. The same applies to Facebook and Yelp, and to disputing a review.
A review shows as pending analysis
That means the AI has not finished analyzing it yet. Sentiment and related data appear once analysis completes.
My automatic responses are going out before I can look at them
Increase the response delay in the advanced settings. Setting it higher is what gives you a window to review what came in before the response is triggered.
Can I use review ratings to target marketing?
Yes. Both Email Marketing and Text Marketing have a customers with a rating criteria in the List Builder that draws on review data captured here.