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Reply to Google reviews

With the Google Reviews channel, every new review of your Google locations comes into Conversations and the agent drafts the public reply in your brand’s tone. You decide whether each reply goes through your approval or whether the ones that meet your rules are published on their own.

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Before you start

• You need a verified Google Business Profile. Google only allows replying to reviews of verified locations.
• Connect the Google account that is the owner or manager of the profile.
• We recommend using Claude Sonnet or higher as the agent’s model (Settings → AI). The reply is published next to your brand, and smaller models are worse at following the rules about what can’t be promised in public.

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Connect your locations

From then on, new reviews come in. If you also want to reply to the ones you already had without a reply, use Earlier reviews. In the Locations section you see each location with its reviews from the last 30 days, the rating and how many are waiting for approval. With the Active switch in the header you pause or reactivate all locations; with the one on each row, just that one.

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How each reply is published

In Publishing you choose the mode: In automatic mode you define:

• Publish on their own from: 5 stars, 4 or more, 3 or more, 2 or more, or all (1 star or more). With “all”, all reviews are published on their own, except the ones held back by the words below or by sensitive topics.
• Include reviews without text (stars only).
• Words that always go through you: if the review or the reply mentions any of them (for example lawyer, food poisoning, scam), it waits for your approval even if it has good stars. The channel comes with a starter list you can edit.

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How the agent replies

In How it replies you set:

• Tone and the Signature that goes at the end of each reply.
• What the agent can offer: apologize, invite the reviewer to continue the conversation privately and say the team will look into it. It only offers this when the review has a complaint or something to improve: to a positive review, it just says thanks.
• Private contact: the email or phone it gives when it invites the reviewer to continue privately.
• Knowledge Base: optional, to use public business details like opening hours or address.

In Guidelines you can add instructions by star rating (5, 3 and 4, 1 and 2), choose what to do with reviews without text, and add extra instructions.

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Fixed rules

These rules are always on and can’t be changed:

• It never offers compensation, discounts or refunds in public.
• It never admits legal liability or makes up facts about the business.
• It never mentions personal data or details of the visit that aren’t in the review.
• It never asks the reviewer to change or delete the review.
• It replies in the language the review is written in.

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Approve and publish

When a review is waiting for approval, we let you know through the bell (and through push notification, if you have it on). In Conversations the review shows up with its stars and the draft in the Suggested reply box:

• Publish: publishes the text (with your changes, if you edited it) on Google.
• Regenerate: asks for a new draft. It uses credits again.
• Discard: deletes the draft without publishing anything.

If the reviewer edits their review, the new version comes in with an updated draft.

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Negative reviews

Reviews with 1 or 2 stars don’t wait in the inbox:

• Their own alert. They come with the Negative review alert through the bell, push and email, with the location, the stars and an excerpt, even if the reply was published on its own by your rules. You choose who gets it and through which channel in Notifications; until you set it up, it follows the Handoff requested settings.
• Ticket in your support tool. In the channel’s Support tickets section you can have every negative review open a ticket in Zendesk, Freshdesk or Odoo.

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Support tickets

To use it, the agent needs to have that tool’s ticket action turned on with Create ticket (see Actions). Then, in My agents → [your agent] → Deploy → Google Reviews → Support tickets:

1. Turn on Create a ticket for each negative review.
2. Choose the Tool. Only the ones with the action ready on this agent show up.
3. Choose which Reviews that open a ticket: only 1 star, 2 stars or fewer (default) or 3 stars or fewer.
4. Type the Requester email: an email from your business (for example, your support email). The reviewer has no email on Google, so the ticket is filed under that email.
5. Save the changes.

The ticket includes the reviewer, the stars, the location, the date, the review text, a link to the conversation in ChatNorris and another to Google. It uses the action’s priority, tags and team, and adds the google_review tag.

• One ticket per review. If the reviewer edits the review, an internal note is added to the same ticket, even if they raised the stars.
• In Conversations you see below the review the ticket number with a link to open it, or a notice that it couldn’t be created.
• Reviews you import with Earlier reviews don’t open tickets.

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Earlier unanswered reviews

In Earlier reviews you choose a range (last 30, 90 or 180 days, or the last year) and click Find reviews. Before importing, you see how many unanswered reviews there are and the maximum number of AI credits it will use. When you confirm, the import moves forward on its own in batches every 15 minutes (up to 200 reviews per agent, the most recent ones) and we let you know through the bell when it’s done. If credits run out, it pauses and you can resume it.

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Analytics

In Analytics → Reviews you see the reviews received, the average rating, the ones waiting for approval, the percentage replied to, the time to publish, the star distribution, the sentiment, the most mentioned topics and the breakdown by location.

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Credits

Each draft the agent writes uses AI credits according to the agent’s model, just like a reply on any other channel. Regenerating a draft charges it again. Publishing doesn’t use credits. See AI models and credits.

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Frequently asked questions