Skip to content

Customer Review Reply Drafter

Example prompt: "When a review notification lands in our restaurant inbox from Google, TripAdvisor, or OpenTable, pull out the rating and the text, draft a reply tuned to the tier — warm for a glowing one, honest for a 3 or 4-star with a niggle, sincere and non-defensive for anything 2-star or below — and save it as a Gmail draft for me to sign off. Don't post anything directly, and ping me in Slack first if it's a critical review."

The Problem

A review lands on Google or TripAdvisor on a Saturday lunchtime and the manager is on the pass. The choice is to reply at 3pm from a phone with our thumbs while clearing covers, or reply on Monday afternoon when the review has sat at the top of the listing all weekend and the diner who wrote it has moved on to the next place. The replies that go up under pressure on a busy Saturday all start to sound the same and the critical ones that need a clear head and ten minutes of thought are the ones that decide whether the next person reading the listing makes a booking or goes elsewhere. Most restaurants we know do not have a process here, and the reply quality tracks how fraught the day was when the notification landed.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We use the email notification the review platform already sends as the trigger, so we do not need a public-review write API to do useful work. An LLM step pulls the rating, the verbatim text, and the reviewer's display name out of the notification email. We match the reviewer against the bookings sheet for the last sixty days so the reply can mention the actual night they were in or the party size, where the data lines up. A second LLM step classifies the review into a tier — glowing, positive with a niggle, critical — and a third drafts the reply in our voice tuned to the tier, with explicit rules about what we will and will not say in public (no compensation offered in writing on a critical review, no defensiveness, no asking the diner to email us privately as the first move). The draft sits in Gmail for the owner to read and send. Critical reviews also fire a red-flag Slack message that pages the owner before any reply goes up, because the phone call to the diner usually comes before the public reply. Glass Box preview shows the rating, the tier, the matched booking, and the drafted reply before anything is logged.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (event): New Gmail message in the restaurant inbox from a known review-notification sender — Google Business Profile (no-reply@google.com or noreply-businessprofile@google.com), TripAdvisor (no-reply@tripadvisor.com), or OpenTable (reservations@opentable.com with a 'New Review' subject).
  2. Step 1 (llm): Extract the rating, the verbatim review text, the reviewer's display name, and the visit date if present from the notification email body.
  3. Step 2 (integration): Look the reviewer up against the 'Bookings' tab in the reservations Google Sheet, fuzzy-matching first name plus last initial against bookings in the last sixty days.
  4. Step 3 (llm): Classify the review into one of three tiers — glowing (5★), positive with a niggle (3-4★ or 5★ with a specific issue raised), critical (1-2★).
  5. Step 4 (llm): Draft a reply in our voice tuned to the tier — short, sincere, never defensive, never offering compensation in writing for critical reviews, never asking the diner to take the conversation to private email as the first move.
  6. Step 5 (integration): Save the reply as a Gmail draft to the reply address on the notification email.
  7. Step 6 (integration): Append a row to the 'Review Replies' tab with the platform, the rating, the tier, the matched booking, a sanitised paraphrase of the review, and the Gmail draft link.
  8. Step 7 (integration): Post a one-liner in #manager on Slack with the rating, the platform, and the draft link; for critical reviews, tag @owner and use a red-flag prefix so the call comes before the public reply.

Integrations Used

  • Gmail — the trigger source (the review-platform notifications already arrive there) and the place the draft reply lives until the owner sends it
  • Google Sheets — the bookings register for the reviewer lookup and the 'Review Replies' log so we can see what was said and who is overdue a follow-up
  • Slack — the manager channel for routine notifications and the red-flag ping that pulls the owner in for the call before any critical reply is posted

Who This Is For

Owner-operators and managers of independent restaurants, bistros, gastropubs, and small chains with two or three sites — anyone who lives and dies by Google and TripAdvisor scores, who currently replies from a phone at the wrong moment or two days late, and who would prefer a draft sitting on the desk for a five-minute sense-check rather than a notification ping in the middle of service.

Time & Cost Saved

The reply itself is a five-minute job done well or a thirty-second job done badly. The cost of getting it wrong on a critical review is one or two bookings the next prospective diner does not make. The workflow does not replace the owner's judgement — it removes the pressure of doing the first draft at the wrong moment and ensures the call happens before the public reply on critical cases. A restaurant doing twenty to forty reviews a month across Google, TripAdvisor, and OpenTable spends an hour or two on replies; the workflow turns that into ten minutes of reading and editing, and shifts the critical replies to after the call rather than before.