Getting more online reviews is essential for any business building an online reputation.

But asking customers for online reviews and responding to Google reviews takes time and patience. For many businesses, it’s a manual process.

This is where MessageDesk comes in. By using a shared Inbox you can streamline your online review collection.

In this article, I'll go over 3 ways to collect more online reviews using MessageDesk.

Before we jump in though, you'll want to have familiarity with the following:

The first way to collect online reviews with MessageDesk is by using the Inbox. Simply create a message template that contains your online review link:

Once your template is created, you'll be able to insert it into any conversation with a contact:

Now you're probably wondering "When do I ask for an online review?"

The best time to ask is soon after you complete the job for the customer. If you're a service business this could be right after you've sent the invoice to a customer.

If you're a retailer, you may ask for an online review after a purchase is completed.

But after all this, you might be wondering - how do I ask the right person for an online review? Because the last thing you want is to ask an angry customer to leave your business a public review...

When asking for online reviews, you may want to start the conversation off with a survey. That way you only ask happy customers to leave a review and give non-happy customers a different route.

This is easy to do with MessageDesk, just set up a feedback autoresponse like the one below. This way Happy customers get prompted to leave a review and non-happy customers get asked to do something else.

In the example, if a contact replies with a 6 or above, they'll automatically be asked for an online review. Otherwise (5 or below) they'll be asked to leave feedback. This is created with Autoresponders in MessageDesk.

To create your survey, just set up an autoresponder in MessageDesk. You'll just need to configure what "Keywords" to autoreply to and what message to send automatically.

But to kick this survey off, you'll still need to send the first text manually from your Inbox.

If you want the whole process to be automated then be sure to keep reading!

With MessageDesk it's possible to automate review collection in a few ways.

The best way is to connect MessageDesk to an invoice provider like QuickBooks Online or Xero. Once connected, MessageDesk can automatically send text messages when invoices are paid (along with other payment automations)

If MessageDesk doesn't connect to your current invoice provider, be sure to check out our Zapier integration. With Zapier, you can connect MessageDesk to over 4,000 other apps and trigger your own automated messages.

Once MessageDesk is connected to an Invoice provider you'll be able to automate messages related to Invoices. The most relevant automation for online reviews is the "Invoice paid" one.

The "Invoice Paid" automation will automatically send a text message either immediately after payment is run or you can wait a few days before sending.

At this point, you can decide if you want to ask for an online review directly or use the "take a survey" approach instead.

Either way, your Online review request will occur automatically with all your paid customers (who are happy*).

*if you use the survey approach