# Auto-reply to happy Podium reviews, escalate the rest > Every weekday, 4 and 5 star reviews get a warm personal reply posted for you, while anything lower goes to Slack for an owner to approve first. - Workflow type: agent - Services: Podium, Slack - Categories: Customer Support - Published: 2026-08-09 ## What it does - Checks every one of your locations each weekday morning for reviews that arrived since the last run - Writes and posts a warm reply to 4 and 5 star reviews that references what the customer actually mentioned - Sends 1 to 3 star reviews to Slack with the full review, star rating, location and a suggested reply, so an owner can call the customer before anything goes public - Finishes with a short Slack recap showing how many new reviews came in and the average rating for each location ## What you'll need - A Podium account with your locations and review sites connected - Permission in Podium to read reviews and post responses on behalf of your locations - A Slack workspace and a channel where your team watches for reviews that need approval - A sense of your brand voice, so the automatic replies sound like you and not like a template ## Prompt Every weekday at 8am, check Podium for customer reviews that arrived across all of my locations and handle them differently depending on the star rating: reply automatically to the happy ones, and escalate the unhappy ones to my team in Slack so a person handles them. Start by calling Podium List Locations to get every location I can access. Then use List Reviews to pull reviews across those locations, and keep only the ones that arrived since the last run. Track the timestamp of the most recent review you processed and use it as the watermark on the next run, so no review is handled twice and none are skipped. On the very first run, look back over the last 24 hours only rather than the entire review history. For each new review, call Get Review to pull the full detail including the review body, the star rating, the reviewer name, the location, and which review site it came from. Before replying to anything, call List Review Responses for that review and skip it if a response has already been posted. An owner may have answered by hand, and the customer should never receive two replies to the same review. For reviews rated 4 or 5 stars, write a warm, on-brand reply and post it back automatically with Create Review Response. Every reply must reference something the customer actually mentioned, for example the specific service they came in for or the team member they named by name. Keep it to two or three sentences, thank them by first name when it is available, and sign off as the location. Do not invent details the customer did not mention, and do not promise discounts, refunds, or offers. If a review is a star rating with no written comment, post a short genuine thank you rather than inventing something they did not say. For reviews rated 1, 2, or 3 stars, never post a reply automatically. Instead use Slack Send a Message to post to my reviews channel with the location name, the star rating, the review site, the reviewer name, the full review text, and a suggested response draft the owner can edit. State clearly in the message that the draft should not be posted until an owner has called the customer first. Post one Slack message per negative review so each one can be discussed in its own thread. After every review has been handled, call Podium Reviews Summary and post one short closing message to the same Slack channel: the number of new reviews found in this run, the average rating per location, and how many were auto-replied versus how many are waiting on owner approval. If there were no new reviews since the last run, post nothing at all rather than an empty summary. Two rules that matter more than the rest. A negative review must never be auto-posted under any circumstances, even if the wording seems mild or the customer sounds satisfied by the end. And if the star rating for a review cannot be determined for any reason, treat it as negative and route it to Slack for a human rather than replying to it automatically. ## How to customize - Timing: runs weekday mornings at 8am by default, switch to every day or twice a day if you get a high volume of reviews - The cutoff: 4 and 5 stars are answered automatically, raise it so only 5 star reviews get an automatic reply if you want a tighter filter - Tone and routing: adjust the brand voice for replies, change which Slack channel receives escalations, or post to Slack as a bot instead of from your own account ## Example output Needs a call before anyone replies: Downtown Auto Care Google · 2 stars · Marcus T. "Booked a 9am oil change and waited over an hour. Front desk was apologetic but nobody told me there was a delay until I asked." Suggested draft (do not post until someone has called Marcus): "Marcus, you are right that we should have told you about the delay up front, and I am sorry we did not. An hour past your appointment time is not the experience we want anyone to have. I would like to make it right and will be reaching out to you directly today." --- This morning's reviews: 4 new since yesterday. 3 auto-replied, 1 waiting on owner approval. Downtown Auto Care: 4.6 average across 2 new reviews Northside Auto Care: 4.9 average across 2 new reviews ## FAQ ### Will it ever reply to a bad review without me seeing it first? No. Only 4 and 5 star reviews are answered automatically. Anything from 1 to 3 stars is posted to Slack as a draft and waits for a person, and the message says plainly that nobody should send it until an owner has called the customer. ### Does this cover Google and Facebook reviews too? Yes, as long as those sites are connected to Podium. Podium pulls reviews from the sites you have linked into one inbox, so a single workflow covers every site rather than one per platform. ### What if someone on my team already replied by hand? The workflow checks whether a review already has a response and skips it. Customers never receive two replies to the same review. ### Will the automatic replies sound generic? Each reply has to reference something the customer actually mentioned, such as the service they came in for or the team member they named. Reviews that are just a star rating with no comment get a short thank you instead of invented detail. ### What happens on a morning with no new reviews? Nothing is posted. The workflow stays quiet unless there is something to report, so the Slack channel does not fill up with empty digests. ### Does it work across more than one location? Yes. It reads every location your Podium login can access, tags each escalation with the location name, and breaks the average rating out per location in the recap. Use this prompt in General Input: https://www.generalinput.com/prompts/auto-reply-to-happy-podium-reviews-escalate-the-rest