Release Notes is our regular update that highlights recent product improvements we’ve made so you can easily stay up to date on what’s new. This release revisits some of our major releases over the last year, as well as a couple new ones as well.
Review Assignment
We’re excited to launch the first of several updates to transform the ReviewsInbox™ into a full task management/ticketing resource.
Background
The LocalTouch platform has always provided a broad set of tools for composing and polishing quality, on-brand review responses at any scale. But as customer service and agency teams grow with the volume of locations and reviews, we decided to expand the functionality further to provide full task management functionality.
Unser Assignment
All reviews can now be assigned to a specific account user (or users) from the review detail pane. Click the avatar/icon to trigger the options menu for user assignment or status, respectively.
My Reviews Folder
Each user can now access all assigned reviews directly in a new “My Reviews” folder in the left navigation.
Review Status
Reviews now come into the platform with a default “Open” status and can be set to one of four additional settings (more to come). Once a review receives a reply, the status will shift to Sent.
Status Folder
Users can see the count of reviews in each status setting. Once a review has a response assigned, the review will move to the Sent folder.
Begin assigning and managing reviews in our ReviewsInbox!
Notification Center
With our larger multi-location clients in mind, we released our Notification Center to alert our users of any community suggested edits to their Google locations.
It’s our hope with this update that our users become more aware of any major changes to their listings, as well as regain the ability to reject any unwanted changes to their location details.
Using the Search box or dropdown filter, users can either search for a specific location or view locations with a specific community edit.
Review your community suggestions with our Notification Center!
Manage Location 2.0
We are constantly exploring how to simplify the most time-consuming workflows to assist our multi-location clients in their everyday. As such, we are excited to announce the release of our Manage Locations 2.0.
With this update, our users can apply one edit to multiple locations or create one post and have it broadcast to any number locations.
Understanding the troublesome aspects of building out spreadsheets to change a handful of elements is why we are thrilled to make the process of changing hours, editing categories, descriptions, etc. easier than ever.
Manage your location details using our Manage Locations 2.0 dashboard!
UTM Building for Posts
Using existing functionality, we have released an update to our newest bulk post workflow to allow our users to create dynamic tracking links for an individual location’s posts.
More nuanced reporting
We always encourage our users to set up UTM tracking parameters for links on their Posts, as even with a Call-to-Action (CTA), there are known issues in the completeness of Google’s data. Through UTM tracking, our users receive an opportunity to gain better insights into the actual results of their posts.
With that in mind, we came to the decision to create a builder within our post workflow to encourage users to set those details up. We also have prepared a Best Practices Guide for anyone curious to learn more about tracking.
Set-up UTM tracking for your next Post launch!
New Dashboard Charts
Five new charts have been added to the review dashboard to provide increased visibility to the changes in review responses, response time, comment ratio, comment length, and word ratio over time.
In-Depth Reporting
Brands that take a strategic approach to reputation management should expect to gain several quantifiable go-forward benefits. To help clients see these early changes, we’ve put together new data charts to better describe the performance changes in the initial weeks and months.
Response Volume & Ratio
The chart below presents the volume of responses published to all review platforms by period (day/week/month) and the corresponding percentage of reviews receiving a response. The real-world example below shows the changes in response volume starting in June 2020 and then the increase in commitment to customer feedback this past summer.
Response Zeit
Our Response Time chart presents the average time to respond to reviews (presented in days and hours). The example below highlights a spike in response time when brands kick start a campaign responding to older reviews and then the significant performance improvement using LocalTouch best practices.
Comment Ratio
Our Comment Ratio chart presents the percentage of reviews that are not merely ratings-only, but also contain a customer comment. Please note that the percentage you experience is highly dependent on your industry and the mix of review sources. Comments in Google are optional, while they are required in Yelp and TripAdvisor.
In the chart below you will see a modest recent upward trend during the last few months. We are hoping to see this continue in a more pronounced fashion as a direct impact of more responses. Consumers who read reviews and brand responses are more likely to leave a comment
Comment Lenght
Our Comment Length chart presents the average number of words contained in all reviews. This particular chart is meant to provide insight into any time specific or season specific trends in the actual quality of reviews.
Comment Word Ratio
This chart presents the percentage words shared in all reviews that fall into each of the star-rating buckets. In the example below, you can see that 43.78% of all the words shared in reviews this past September were in 5-Star reviews.
Why not apparent in this example, LocalTouch is building a case study for a brand that went from ignoring customer feedback to an industry leader.
Dig into your review content with our new charts!
Brand Image Slideshow
Through our ever-ongoing project to improve visibility into location details and ensure that brands are living up to GMB best practices, we have added to our location management dashboard an image slideshow.
Viewable when the detail panel is expanded, this slideshow allows brands to better monitor images that’ve been uploaded “By Owner”; Whether that be someone currently on the team or someone with past GMB access.
With this, brands can better understand what story is being told to the public through their images, and if those images are still on brand or not.
Check out your Brand Image Slideshow today!
Review Showcase
We are delighted to announce that in effort to support our users who want to showcase their star ratings on their website, we have added a new dashboard to do just that
With Review Showcase, our users can customize and design a widget to match their brand aesthetic.
Our showcase operates as a small bit of code that can be placed on the website landing page(s) to display their various feedback channels.
There are several elements that can be customized during the initial building of the widget including,
Star Rating
Location (s)
Date Range
Review Source
Etc...
We hope to add a few additional elements in the next several weeks, as well as release the full CSS for total customization options.
If you would like to set up a Review Showcase, please email us at contact@localtouch.io
QOL Updates
Smaller, quality-of-life updates we hope users will appreciate.
New Controls for Filter Management
All accounts now have expanded visibility and control of the filters created in the platform.
Users will be able to edit the filter from the page or create a new basic filter structure. In the coming months, we will be streamlining all the filters used within the platform so that all controls have common elements and presentations.
Multi-search in ReviewsInbox
To provide a more rounded use of our search box, we have made an update to allow multiple search terms to be used within a singular search. This allows users to pull all reviews that contain any of the searched words.
Searches can then be saved as filters and applied throughout the application or used on any automated reporting. The same functionality is available for creating a filter on the names of the reviewers, but instead of a space between terms/phrases, users would use double pipes (||).
Multi-select for Locations Filter in ReviewsInbox
A quick fix to our locations filter; Users can now select multiple locations within our dropdown to apply and/or save a filter.
With this update, it’s our hope that we can improve our users everyday response workflow and allow for more nuanced filtering and reporting.
Turning off chat bubble
This item is one that came directly from a handful of clients who found that while our chat bubble was a great resource to reach the team, it unfortunately got in the way of accessing details within the platform.
As we’ve mentioned before, we love receiving platform improvement requests from clients as they provide us great insight into our user’s everyday workflow. As such, to ensure that there are no issues with accessing different elements of the application, we have added the ability to turn our chat bubble on and off.
A major win for our clients still working from home with a limited screen resolution.
Confirmation requirement controls
For our users who like to keep things simple including their workflows, we are happy to announce the ability to disable the confirmation windows for review responses, closing reviews, and marking reviews as closed.
Controlling and managing reviews can be faster than ever.
As always, please let us know if you have questions about these enhancements or if you have a suggestion.