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How to use Automatic Feedback Service

How to use Automatic Feedback Service

Automatic Feedback Service (AFS) is an invitation method that can be used to automate the collection of service and product reviews. In this guide, we’ll explain how it works and how to set it up.
 

How does AFS work?

You send an email to your customer after they’ve had an interaction with your business. If you include Complete-Reviews as a BCC on this email, it then serves as a trigger email that activates AFS and notifies us that we should send this customer a review invitation. Here's a breakdown: 

1. Your customer makes a purchase or has a service experience with your business.

2. You send them a transactional email. This will trigger a separate email to be sent to Complete-Reviews, which notifies us to send a review invitation.

3. We'll queue an invitation to be sent. It will be delivered in 7 days by default, but you can also choose a custom send time.

4. Your customer will receive the invitation, which allows them to write a review of their experience with your business on Complete-Reviews.

The transactional email that you use to trigger AFS can be many things. Some examples include: purchase orders or confirmations, receipts, welcome emails, support requests, shipping notifications, etc.

Note: BCC stands for "Blind Carbon Copy." It’s a way to send an email to others without the main recipient knowing. Your customer will not be able to see that the email was also sent to Complete-Reviews.

What if I don’t have a BCC field?

No BCC? No worries! The go-to workaround is to send a separate trigger email directly to your unique Complete-Reviews email address.

You’ll need to include a dynamic structured data snippet in that trigger email, either in the body of the email as plain text or in the HTML.

Read this article to learn more about how to do this.

How to set it up

  1. In Complete-Reviews Business, go to Get Reviews > Automatic Feedback Service.
  2. You’ll see your unique Complete-Reviews email address. You can copy it by clicking Copy email address.
  3. Add this address as a BCC recipient on the transactional email you want to use to trigger AFS. You’ll need to do this in the email settings of whichever system you’re using to trigger from.

After you send your transactional email to a customer, we’ll soon get the trigger email. Once we receive it, a review invitation will automatically be queued for delivery.

To check that your setup is working correctly, visit your Invitation History. From there, you can view scheduled and sent review invitations. If you can see invitations being created from recent transactions, that means you’ve set it up properly!

Customize your AFS invitations

Using the basic AFS setup is effective on its own, but if you want to further enhance your invitations and add more functionality, you can add a structured data snippet to your email template. Read more about how to use structured data for AFS in this article.

You can also check out the following articles to learn how to customize your invitation settings and timing.

And finally, you can take a look here to find out how you can customize your AFS invitations with customers' names and reference numbers.

Want to know more?

Get in touch to find out more about what we do to build trust and promote transparency in online reviews.