How to use Automatic Feedback Service (AFS)

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.

BCC stands for "Blind Carbon Copy." It’s a way to send an email to others without the main recipient knowing. Your customer will not be able to see that the email was also sent to Trustpilot.

How to set it up

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, either immediately or 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.

Customize your AFS invitations

By default, AFS automatically pulls names and reference IDs from email subject lines to invitations. Learn more about how this works here.

While the basic AFS setup is effective, you can enhance your invitations with added functionality and personalization. One way to elevate your invitations is by including a structured data snippet into your email template. For more information, check out this article. 

Some plans have access to customized invitation templates that allow you to add your logo and personalize your emails to match your business’s branding. Learn more about how to customize your review invitation template here.

When setting up AFS, you have the ability to customize various settings for your review invitations, such as timing, delivery, and template options. To explore more customization options, check out our articles on invitation settings and time & delivery settings.

What if I don’t have a BCC field?

No BCC? No worries! The go-to workaround is to send a separate trigger email directly to your unique Trustpilot email address.

You’ll need to include a dynamic structured data snippet in that trigger email, either in the body of the email as plain text or in the HTML.

You can also check out our Trustpilot ecommerce integrations, which have automatic invitations built in to their functionalities.

How to set it up without a BCC field

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

You've now created an automated event. When completed, a trigger with the information pulled from the structured data snippet will be sent to Trustpilot. This notifies us to generate an invitation, which we’ll send to your customer at an automatically optimized time.

Partner guides

You can also take a look at these guides on how to use AFS for certain Trustpilot partner integrations. The guides are not official Trustpilot support documentation, so we can’t claim responsibility for their content or provide technical support, but they can be useful for finding out more information about specific platforms and how they interact with Trustpilot AFS.

How to check if AFS is working

To ensure your AFS is working correctly, use this checklist and make sure to:

• Copy your unique Trustpilot email address
• Add this email address as a BCC in a transactional email or add it in the To: field of a trigger email.
• Insert the structured data snippet into the html code of your transactional email. Make sure that it’s implemented as per our examples in this article.
• 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. Good job!

Invitation status

If your invitations are being successfully sent, you should see one of the following status messages on your invitation status page.

Sometimes things don’t go quite right, and invitations can’t be delivered. You can find a comprehensive list of all possible invitation statuses here, alongside some troubleshooting tips and tricks.

For transparency reasons, you won’t be able to send test invitations to addresses with the same domain as your company.