How Generative Review Response Can Help Your Brand Meet Customers’ Expectations

Reviews aren't just important for reputation management anymore. They're a core data source for AI. Well-managed reviews are full of fresh, relevant, keyword-rich content that search algorithms prioritize and AI models mine. To help your brand surface everywhere from the Local Pack to AI Overviews use three proven strategies:

1. Use smart software to manage reviews at scale.

2. Be consistent across all first- and third-party sites.

3. Respond to reviews a minimum of once per week.

That last point is key: your customers aren't only looking at the reviews other people write. They expect a brand to respond to their review promptly. In fact:

• 1 in 10 customers expect brands to respond within moments of leaving an online review.

• 1 in 4 expect a same-day response.

• 2 in 5 expect to hear from brands within one week.

• 2 in 3 customers will update reviews, increase star ratings, or remove negative reviews after they receive a response to their feedback.

Effectively using this channel to meet and exceed customer expectations is vital for delivering a great experience, fostering loyalty, and driving growth.

As you can see, responding to reviews is incredibly important. However, reading and interacting with every online review across hundreds or thousands of locations can be a significant and time-consuming challenge. In response, we've made substantial investments to ease this burden for our customers by incorporating AI to manage large-scale customer engagement without sacrificing brand authenticity.

Earlier this year, we launched Generative Review Response, a tool that allows brands to draft review responses using AI and respond to reviews at scale while keeping responses personalized to the customer and their feedback. Customizable AI prompts and dynamic inputs allow brands to respond in their brand voice and include location-specific information or instructions in their responses.

Top brands using Generative Review Response have seen impressive results, with an average 50% increase in review response rate and a 34% reduction in response time.* With Generative Review Response, brands have been able to respond to more reviews faster, meeting customer expectations and boosting their local reputation.

Save time and reduce the manual work involved when responding to customer reviews by generating high-quality automated responses powered by large language models (LLM). Yext's Generative Review Response allows you to instruct the LLM on how to respond to your customer reviews. Provide simple guidelines like which language to respond in, the tone of voice to use, how many sentences the response should be, or specific embedded data fields that pull directly from centralized or de-centralized brand information.

At Yext, we're committed to continually enhancing how brands can use AI to manage their digital presence and improve their reputation. In our August Release, we launched the Generative Response Playground, a testing environment for experimenting with AI prompts to generate even better review responses.

This feature allows brand marketers to write prompts and generate responses to reviews, all in a controlled environment. In the Generative Response Playground, users can shift between positive and negative review examples to see how their prompts perform across various feedback types. This helps brands safely and quickly iterate prompts — writing and adjusting instructions, adding in different brand information (i.e., including a support email in the response), and viewing the output all in one screen. In response, users can fine-tune their prompts to deliver on-brand responses that follow specific guidelines.

With the response playground in Generative Review Response, brands like yours can use AI to deliver authentic, on-brand responses at scale.

Curious about how the Generative Review Response works? Sign up for a personalized demo.

*Yext data, 2024