Review automation is streamlining and speeding up your online review-related activities through one or more software tools.These tools usually sit between a review platform and the existing software ecosystem you use, and they essentially automate the relationship between the two.But why would you want to add another tool to your overflowing tool stack?Well, here’s three reasons:
- Productivity - You can land a more efficient way of managing reviews by transferring some or most of the time-consuming tasks from your people to technology.
- Scale - Take your review management and review monitoring efforts to the next level and get the most out of your user-generated content across leading review sites.
- Insights - Gain a better understanding of where you and your competitors are in the market. Let’s face it: there is no way your team could collect and analyze all these reviews manually.
Most review automation tools sit under the ‘reputation management’ category on software sites. Your search on these platforms will populate dozens of results. However, few (and I mean few) are designed for B2Bs, and even fewer for SaaS businesses.In this article, you’ll find eight of the most relevant and valuable tools for these two business types.In terms of their capabilities, they either offer full or partial automation for:
- Generating and collecting reviews
- Managing and responding to reviews
- Monitoring online reviews
But before you jump to the list and pick your tool, there is one thing you need to think about.
Just because it can be automated doesn’t mean it should be automated
The idea is to be smart about what’s worth automating and what isn’t. So before you go wild and sign up for one or more tools promising to take the manpower out of all your review management, put your business hat on.Ask yourself three vital questions:
- What do I gain, and what do I lose if I automate this process?
- In the long run, is this automation going to benefit my business by driving my strategic focus, and does it come with a brand reputation risk?
- Will it help me and my team manage and leverage online reviews to drive business growth and increase customer satisfaction?
When selecting your review automation tools:
- Know that automation shouldn’t come at the cost of risking or damaging your brand and customer relationship with users
- Be selective with the areas of review management you choose to automate
- Focus on automating the time-consuming processes, such as collating reviews from multiple platforms, tagging, or aggregating reviews for actioning
- Leave automation out of the processes that are incremental in building personalized, authentic relationships with your users, such as responding to negative reviews and fixing the problems your users indirectly seek support with
#1 Reviewflowz for B2B SaaS
Reviewflowz is a review management tool specially built for SaaS companies, which is why it’s #1 on this list – not just because we're biased. It offers a range of review generation and management features and robust review monitoring. Its dynamic review widgets also help sweeten the deal, making it an ideal all-in-one solution.
Review monitoring
- Reviewflowz lets you track and monitor your and your competitors' reviews worldwide in any language across all review platforms. This includes leading software review sites (Capterra and G2), generic review platforms (Trustpilot and Amazon), app marketplaces (Chrome, Salesforce AppExchange, WordPress plugins, Shopify apps, App Store, Play Store), as well as local review platforms (Google Maps, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Airbnb). For any platform not currently supported, Reviewflowz offers a money-back guarantee to add new platforms within two weeks for Premium plans and two months for Lite users.
- You can access all past and future reviews. Search, filter, tag reviews on all plans, and export all the data to CSV on all Pro, Premium, and Enterprise plans so you can send it off to emails, Slack, MS Teams, Zapier, webhooks, or API polling for actioning.
- Filter review notifications by star rating, source, keywords, language, or tags. Once you define review tags, Lenny, the platform’s GPT-4-powered AI assistant, will automate the process for past and incoming reviews for you.
- The platform’s built-in reporting and analytics also let you track your progress and identify what impacts your KPIs most.
- If you are after AI insights on your review reporting, you can ask Lenny to access all your reviews to answer direct questions, pull testimonials for a specific use case, or build reports or charts.
- Premium and Enterprise plans also automatically let you identify your reviewers (LinkedIn IDs).
Review generation
- All plans come with email review generation campaigns, so you can send NPS, CSAT, or star-rating surveys to customers with links to post a public review on the platform of your choice. Premium and Enterprise plans offer magic link review generation campaigns and an advanced review balancing engine.
- You can leverage one of Reviewflowz’s landing page templates to make sure you send a clear, easy-to-fill-in communication request with a reward incentive. That way, you increase your chances of customers committing to providing official feedback. It’s a small token of appreciation for spending the time to share their voice.
Something to consider
On top of the above automation features, Reviewflowz also offers dynamic widgets that you can use to showcase your rocking reviews across your website, sales, and marketing content. Another helpful tool you can use, whether you sign up for this Reviewflowz or not, is the Free G2 Rank Tracker. It lets you access any G2-listed product’s categories and rankings over time.Capterra rating: 4.8Pricing: From $29 p/m
#2 Birdeye for local businesses and brands
Birdeye is an all-in-one reputation, social media, and customer experience platform. When it comes to review automation, its capabilities are focused on review generation, management and marketing, and, to a smaller degree, review monitoring.
Review generation
- Let your customers turn their survey responses into reviews so they don’t have to do both separately.
- It gives you the option to set review requests on auto-pilot after every purchase
- Integrated with Google’s private API, you can use scannable QR codes to take your customers directly to Google to leave a review.
Review management
- Ability to manage and respond to reviews from over 200 review platforms from one centralized dashboard. You can tag, respond, or assign reviews to a rep as a support ticket.
- BirdAI, the platform’s AI writing bot, automates drafting replies and translation. You can use it to generate responses from scratch or rephrase your replies to make sure they are on-brand and have the right tone. It can also translate reviews into English and your responses into your customers' language.
- Response automation lets you create customized responses for specific review sources, locations, or star ratings that go out automatically.
Review monitoring
- Track and monitor review trends over time and generate review summaries with the help of AI to capture key themes across customer reviews.
- Location-level reporting and generation campaign reporting are used to monitor reviews you get from a source, location, or channel.
- For employers and enterprises, you can also access reporting on your team’s response rates and times.
Something to consider
Because Birdeye is a powerful platform with a mix of broad capabilities and automation, it’s pricey. However, because they offer solutions for everything from reviews, social media, messaging, web chat, and referrals, it might be worth the money. Going with one centralized platform instead of signing up and paying for several will definitely streamline your processes.G2 rating: 4.8Pricing: Provided by pricing configurator.
#3 Reviewtrackers for businesses wanting to merge reviews and social
Reviewtrackers is a comprehensive reputation management platform that provides solutions for everything from review and social media monitoring and management to local SEO, customer experience analytics, and competitor analysis.
Top automation features
Review monitoring, management, and generation
- A perk of this platform is its ability to streamline and merge all your reviews and social media efforts. By integrating Hootsuite with Reviewtrackers, you and your team can monitor and manage incoming reviews and social mentions from one place.
- The tool collects reviews from over 120 sites, including Google, Yelp, Facebook, BBB, TripAdvisor, and OpenTable.
- AI-generated responses and personalized Smart Response templates help your teams get back to users faster.
SaaS review monitoring (add-on capabilities)
- Reviewtrackers offers two add-on features that would be valuable to SaaS businesses, including Software Brand Monitoring, which helps you manage user feedback on Capterra, Google, and Facebook, and App Store Monitoring for Google Play Store and iOS. Both come at an extra cost.
Something to consider
With its comprehensive suite of solutions for reputation management, Reviewtrackers is ideal for multi-location businesses of all sizes, from small to enterprises. But if your focus is software, this may not be the best option, as the only SaaS site they currently track is Capterra.Capterra rating: 4.7Pricing: Three plans are available, and for pricing, you need to book a demo
#4 Grade us for agencies, marketers, and SEOs
Grade us is a white-label review management platform for marketers, agencies, and SEOs. Its key focus is review generation.
Review generation
- The core automation feature of Grade us is a landing page designed to simplify the review submission process for customers. This landing page, which houses links to multiple review sites, is sent to your customers via email or SMS.
- Automated email drip campaigns let you send unlimited follow-up requests and reminders.
Review monitoring
- Set up email alerts for you, your team, and your clients so you can monitor and action reviews quickly.
- For SaaS business, Grade us monitors the major review platforms like Capterra, G2, GetApp, Software Advice, and TrustRadius.
- Generate reports on review campaigns to identify portfolio performance and the ratio of click-through rates and submitted reviews.
Something to consider
Grade us also offers two key review marketing automation features. The first is a review stream widget (or the WordPress plugin) for your website. The second is automatic social media sharing on Facebook.Capterra rating: 4.8Pricing: From $110 p/m
#5 Reviewshake for small to medium-sized businesses & resellers
Reviewshake is an online review automation tool that helps businesses manage and monitor reviews, run review generation campaigns, and market reviews.
Review generation
- Access and use automatically generated and customizable landing pages (email and SMS) for written and video review or testimonial requests.
- Import your current customer base via CSV, API access, or Zapier integrations, and set up and run drip campaigns to boost your review potential.
Review management
- Reviewshakes supports over 120 sites, including the leading software review sites like Gartner, Capterra, G2, and TrustRadius. With one centralized dashboard for all your reviews, you can easily allocate actions to your team to manage them.
- Reviewshake does offer direct response capability for some review sites, directly from their dashboard, but not all. However, it does include a URL to the relevant site from their dashboard so you can respond quickly.
- The Customer Chat (formerly ‘Inbox’) feature is a perk of this platform. It lets you engage in a two-way SMS conversation with your customers privately so you can immediately respond to and take action on negative experiences. This is a brilliant solution for retaining customers who have an initial bad experience. However, this option is only available on select SMB accounts and individuals on Agency plans)
- Automate and grow your social proof with Reviewshake’s widgets and social sharing of your best testimonials and reviews on Google, Twitter, and Facebook.
Something to consider
An additional feature offered by Reviewshake is competitor review monitoring. There is a section for competitors where you can add and delete key market rivals to track and get insights from their customers’ online reviews.G2 rating: 4.5Pricing: From $79 p/m for businesses or $199 p/m for agencies
#6 Appfollow for app store businesses
AppFollow is an app reputation management platform. It offers an integrated tool for app review management and performance analysis and comes with robust automation features.
App review monitoring
- Track and monitor your app and competitors' apps across the App Store, Google Play, Microsoft Store (including desktop and Xbox games), Mac App Store, and Huawei AppGallery.
- Access a range of app data, including reviews, star history, developer replies, likes/dislikes, rankings, and more.
- Monitor your app updates either via the AppFollow dashboard or send them to email, Slack, Discord, or API.
- You can filter, sort, and tag reviews and create AI-generated summaries, which give you a quick overview of key sentiments and feedback themes.
- You can set custom alerts for tags that spot critical issues in reviews so you can act immediately.
App review management
- You can choose to receive and reply to reviews from the AppFollow dashboard or send them to Slack, Zendesk, Helpshift, Discord, and 30 other tools for actioning.
- The Bulk Action button can manage responses at scale by sending one response to selected customers, using a saved template from the past, or using the Random Reply Template to customize your responses. The website provides lots of support materials on how to use auto-replies so they don’t come across as generic. This is definitely a nice resource to have.
- Automate tagging, responding to, and translating reviews in any language, and report malicious reviews.
Something to consider
The obvious thing about this tool is that it's limited to apps only. However, if app stores are your strategic focus, it’s probably one of the best options on the market.G2 rating: 4.6Pricing: Free and priced plans from $139 p/m (billed annually or $179 p/m billed monthly)
#7 Canny for software builders
Canny is a platform created for SaaS companies wanting to capture, organize, and analyze user feedback for product insights and development.
Feedback collection & management
- Automatically capture customer feedback and feature requests from conversations and house them on a dedicated, private, or public feedback board.
- Detect and merge duplicates to identify and quantify key themes and priority requests. Then, connect users with the same requests to ignite further discussion and send automatic updates to the entire group.
- Set up a feedback portal to let users share thoughts and issues directly from your site.
- Integration with your customer support tools lets your team capture user feedback.
- The Canny Identify feature connects your existing user accounts so you know who is giving feedback. Customers don’t need to sign up for Canny.
- Centralize feedback from all sources via integrations (from customer-facing to product development) and add additional feedback manually.
Something to consider
It’s important to note that Canny is not an automation tool for traditional review management and monitoring. However, if you are in the business of building software, it could be an invaluable addition to your Voice of Customer tech stack.G2 rating: 4.6Pricing: Free and paid plans from $79 p/m
#8 Yext for multi-location brands in healthcare, finance, and high-tech
Yext is a composable software platform that offers a broad range of capabilities to automate and optimize your business’s online presence and reputation.
Review generation ad management
- With Yext’s direct integrations, you can collect and aggregate all your online reviews from sites like Google Maps, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and Trustpilot into one centralized dashboard.
- Dynamic response building blocks to automate and personalize messages without templates.
- Request reviews and showcase them on your website.
Review monitoring
- Track and monitor your reviews against up to five competitors to better understand where you stand in the market.
- Automate your reporting with natural language sentiment analysis tools to help you uncover critical themes of your reviews to make impactful changes that matter to your customer base.
Something to consider
One thing to consider with Yext is that while it offers review automation capabilities, the platform’s primary focus is local and online searches. Also, review monitoring is only available on their highest-paid plan. Most SaaS businesses, particularly smaller ones, may not need the majority of features it offers and might be better off choosing a more targeted tool for review monitoring and management alone.G2 rating: 4.4Pricing: $19 p/w (billed annually)
