What is AFS?

Our Automatic Feedback Service (AFS) automatically sends review invitations to your customers after they make a purchase or have a service experience with your business. With AFS, you'll receive more reviews and get better insight into what your customers think. You can then use those insights to improve customer satisfaction. All reviews collected using AFS are considered as verified reviews, which can increase trust and visibility.

How does AFS work?

You send an email to your customer after they’ve had an interaction with your business. If you include Trustpilot as a BCC on this email, it then serves as a trigger email that activates AFS and notifies us that we should send this customer a review invitation. Here's a breakdown:

1. Your customer makes a purchase or has a service experience with your business.

2. You send them a transactional email. This will trigger a separate email to be sent to Trustpilot, which notifies us to send a review invitation.

3. We'll queue an invitation to be sent. It will be delivered in 7 days by default, but you can also choose a custom send time.

4. Your customer will receive the invitation, which allows them to write a review of their experience with your business on Trustpilot.

The transactional email that you use to trigger AFS can be many things. Some examples include: purchase orders or confirmations, receipts, welcome emails, support requests, shipping notifications, etc.

If your system doesn’t have a BCC field, then you can also set it up without a BCC field or with one of our integrations.

Set up AFS with a BCC field

1. In Trustpilot Business, go to Get reviews > Invitation methods.
2. Under Let us send review invites for you, click Get started. This opens the Automatic Feedback Service (AFS) page.
3. Under Choose your email style, you can select your preferred email template by clicking Edit. Depending on your plan, you’ll have the following options:
   • Optimized Templates for Trustpilot: Choose from templates designed for either Non-purchase Experiences or Purchase Experiences.
   • Your Custom Templates: If your plan includes this feature, you can select from any custom templates you’ve created.
     
     Once you've made your selection, Click Save.
4. Under Timing and delivery, click Edit to decide when your review invitations are sent. Depending on your plan, you’ll be able to decide the following:
   • When to send invitations to your customers: after a delay of days, weeks, or months.
   • What time to send invitations, either at an optimized time or at a specific time of day, if your plan includes this feature.
   • How often your customers should receive invitations, either after each purchase or service experience or after a set period of days, weeks, or months.
     
     Once you've made your selection, Click Save.
5. Under Copy this email address, you’ll find your unique Trustpilot email address. Click Copy.
6. Next, paste it into your email system as a BCC recipient on the transactional email you want to use to trigger AFS. Make sure to save the update in your email system.
7. After completing these steps, your invitations will be scheduled according to your settings. Click I’ve done this, and a window will appear where you can choose to:
   
   • Track your invitations: Check your invitation status page to ensure they’ve been set up correctly and are sending as expected.
   • Manage notifications: Adjust your personal email notification settings to receive updates whenever new reviews come in.
   • Use data snippets: Further personalize your review invitations by adding data snippets. Learn more in this article.

Set up AFS without a BCC field

Choose a trigger email, such as order confirmations or shipping notifications and insert a dynamic structured data snippet into your email template. This snippet serves as the trigger for AFS, notifying Trustpilot to send a review invitation to your customers. We'll queue the invitation for delivery, and your customers will have the perfect opportunity to share their feedback. Once you’ve decided on your trigger email, you’ll need to add the structured data snippet to that email’s template.

Here’s a quick example of what a basic snippet would look like:

<script type="application/json+trustpilot">
{
"recipientName": "Dynamic placeholder",
"recipientEmail": "Dynamic placeholder",
"referenceId": "Dynamic placeholder"
}
</script>

It’s very important to note that this snippet must be implemented with the dynamic placeholders used by your specific platform. These placeholders vary from platform to platform, so be sure to find the right ones for your system and replace the examples above with the relevant information.

To ensure the snippet loads correctly, do not modify its format - All the commas, quotation marks, and colons are necessary.

1. In Trustpilot Business, copy your unique Trustpilot email address. You can find it here.
2. Within the settings of your CRM or ecommerce platform, find the section where you can create trigger/notification emails. Some systems call this section notifications, actions, etc.
3. Create a new trigger/notification email dedicated to Trustpilot - for example, after a confirmation of delivery. Add your dynamic structured data snippet in the HTML body of the email.
4. The settings of this trigger email will have a To: field. This is where you’ll paste the unique Trustpilot email address you copied in Step 1. Please ensure that only Trustpilot receives this trigger email.

To check that your setup is working correctly, visit your invitation status page. From there, you can view scheduled and sent review invitations. If you can see invitations being created from recent transactions, that means you’ve set it up properly!

Trustpilot’s ecommerce integrations

You can easily send review invitations to your customers via our ecommerce integrations. Explore our integrations and learn more here.
If you use Shopify and want to send review invitations with AFS instead of the integration, look no farther! Learn more about how to set it up here.