Now that artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant inroads into the business world, it’s important to decide if and how to use it. Because AI can mimic natural language and human interactions, AI tools are good for creating and automating various marketing and customer engagement content that feels authentic to customers.
Take review management, for example. You can use AI to automate your replies to customer reviews, saving time and reducing the creative burden of having to come up with the right wording yourself — while still providing a human-like experience for the audience.
Here’s a closer look at the reasons to use AI review responses, their benefits, how to get started with them, and best practices for responsibly incorporating them into your business or agency.
The case for using an AI review response generator
Responding to reviews is a necessary part of review management. It shows your customers that you’re paying attention and care about their experience and feedback. When customers see that you took the time to respond to their reviews, they feel more trusting and emotionally positive toward your business. Trust and positive emotion lead to greater customer loyalty, which leads to greater revenue.
But responding to every review is a time-consuming, often stressful task. Knowing what to say is hard, especially when you’re pressured to respond. Using templates for your responses effectively reduces time and creative effort. However, someone still has to choose the template, adapt it to the review, and keep the whole process rolling along — whether you run a small business and handle everything in-house, or you run a marketing agency that manages reviews for your clients.
AI review responses, on the other hand, can speed up the entire process and make it much less burdensome for the person or team tasked with the job. AI is well-suited for generating short content, like review responses, that include precise details to avoid sounding generic. When done well, an AI review response:
- Includes the customer’s name
- References the exact products or services mentioned in the review
- Identifies and matches the sentiment of the review — i.e. positive, negative, or neutral
- Creates an appropriate, automated response that sounds like a human
Below is a real example of an automated AI review response:
Benefits of using AI review responses
Using an AI review response generator enables you to:
- Save time and redirect it: Reading reviews and writing a response for each one can take precious hours away from other review management tasks. With automated AI review responses, you can earn that time back and use it for valuable activities like analyzing customer feedback to determine what business improvements will positively impact the customer experience.
- Craft more personalized responses: Writing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Automated AI review responses do the writing for you. They may do a better job analyzing and matching sentiment and including specific, personalized details that make the customer feel noticed and appreciated.
- Scale your efforts: As you receive more reviews, the effort required to track and respond to them increases exponentially. Turning the response piece over to AI enables you to scale review management efficiently without skipping the responses.
- Improve the timeliness of responses: Many customers expect a review response within 24-48 hours. With an AI review response generator, you can increase your response times since it’s much faster to jump in with the tool and click a button than manually track and respond to reviews.
How to get started with automated AI review responses
The best way to introduce AI into your review response process is to implement a comprehensive review management platform that includes automated AI-powered features. There are many solutions available today, but at minimum, the platform you choose should allow you to:
- Set up automated responses to positive reviews: Aided by natural language processing (NLP) and ChatGPT’s learning model, use the platform to generate an automated, authentic, and personalized response to positive reviews that will resonate with customers.
- Get suggested responses to negative reviews: Responding to negative reviews can be particularly daunting since you don’t want to say the wrong thing and inadvertently make a bad situation worse. Supported by sentiment analysis, use the platform to get suggestions for tailored, empathetic, and constructive responses to a negative review that can help turn a potential detractor into a loyal customer.
Best practices for AI review responses
For all the efficient, helpful things AI can do, it’s still a sticky topic for many people. Some may balk at today’s AI trends, or at the very least feel some mild uncertainty about AI in general. To help you responsibly incorporate AI into review management and keep respect for your customers front and center, here are some best practices to follow:
1. Keep humans involved
Because AI has limitations, it still requires some level of human oversight. AI tools are capable of making mistakes and may not be great at parsing complicated scenarios. As such, some situations are easier to hand over to an AI tool than others. For example, automating AI review responses to positive reviews works well because you only need a simple, straightforward response that requires little to no human input.
But for a negative review that requires complex problem-solving or additional back-and-forth with the customer to root out the exact issue, a human should definitely be involved. They need to make sure that if AI is used for any part of the response, the result is appropriate and accurate — or they might decide that it’s best to forgo AI completely and handle the response themselves.
2. Be upfront about your use of generative AI tools
Customer trust in your business is critical — and any misstep that makes customers think your business is being less than transparent can send them straight to your competition or over to social media to complain. The goal isn’t to deny your use of AI-generated content, but to be clear about when you use it.
If you choose to use an AI review response generator, say so. You can include language about it in a general disclaimer or as part of your business terms and conditions. Or be specific about the types of instances when you might use AI. And make sure to update your language and disclosures as your use of AI evolves.
3. Make AI part of the feedback you gather
AI is a business tool like any other. So just like you might ask for customer feedback about your ordering and delivery, SMS, or technical support tools, you can do the same for AI review responses.
Check in with your customers to see what’s working about it and what isn’t. By showing your interest in what they really think, it makes them feel like a valued part of your business. And when customers feel included and invested, they’re also more likely to have an open attitude toward your business and the decisions you make. They’ll be honest with you knowing that you’re being honest with them.
To learn how GatherUp’s review management platform with AI-powered features can help you generate and automate AI review responses, start your free trial today.
