How the chat works

BetterReviews replaces the traditional review form with a short, friendly chat. Instead of staring at a blank textbox, your customer answers a few natural questions, optionally adds a photo, and ends up with a review that reads like something a human actually wrote.

This page walks you through exactly what your customer sees — step by step — and what lands in your dashboard when they’re done. If you’ve never watched a customer go through the flow, start here.

The customer’s experience

1. Arriving

Your customer gets to the chat through one of two doors: the review request email BetterReviews sends after the Shopify event you chose (per-shipment on fulfillment by default, so split orders get one email per box), or a “Write a Review” button on the product page.

Either way, they land on a full-screen chat that feels like texting a friendly store assistant. No signup, no forms up front, no branding that screams “marketing.”

2. The turn loop

The chat asks a question. Your customer answers. The chat responds to what they said — not a script — and asks something useful as a follow-up.

Under the hood, two AIs are working in parallel on every message: one decides what to say next, another drafts the review as the conversation unfolds. Your customer never sees the draft until the end.

3. Photo moment

When the conversation feels substantive and the vibe is positive, the chat gently invites a photo. It’s a single tap — paperclip or camera — no separate upload wizard.

Photos go straight to our storage, run through a vision model for quality and tagging, and attach to the review automatically. Your customer can skip if they don’t want to share one.

4. When a customer needs help

Sometimes a “review” turns into a support issue — the package never arrived, the item broke, they want a return. The chat catches that and flips modes: instead of pushing for a review, it offers to pass the message to your team.

If the customer accepts, we collect their contact info (pre-filled if we already have it from the order), email you the details, and — importantly — ask if they still want to finish the review afterward. No hijacking.

5. Drafting the review

When the chat has enough material, it shows the draft. This is generated from the conversation — your customer’s own words, not AI fluff — and they can edit it freely, tweak the star rating, change the title, or add more photos.

The submit button is deliberately hidden until the chat thinks the review is complete. This prevents “nice!” one-word submissions that tank your review quality.

6. Submit and thank you

One tap. The review is saved, media is attached, and your customer sees a brief thank-you. If auto-approve is on and the review meets your quality bar, it’s published to the widget immediately. If not, it sits in your moderation queue.

Why it works this way

A few design decisions that surprise merchants the first time they notice them. They’re all intentional.

Why the photo card sometimes doesn’t appear. If the conversation is headed toward a low rating (defects, complaints, disappointment), asking for a photo feels tone-deaf. The chat reads sentiment turn-by-turn and skips the photo prompt for unhappy customers. Happy customers still see it.

Why the support card can come back. If a customer dismisses the first “need help?” offer but a real issue surfaces later in the chat, we’ll re-offer after a few turns. We don’t want to badger, but we also don’t want to miss a genuine problem that your customer only hints at on turn 2 and explains fully on turn 5.

Why abandoned chats are free. If a customer starts the chat and never submits, it doesn’t count toward your monthly quota. Billing aligns with value delivered — no review, no charge. Conversations older than 24 hours are swept as abandoned.

What you’ll see on your end

When your customer submits, three things happen in your BetterReviews admin:

A new review lands in the Reviews tab. Auto-approve is off by default — every new review waits for your decision in the Pending tab, with the rating, text, photos, and submit date surfaced in a detail modal. Turn on auto-approve rules in Collect if you want verified buyer, email-verified, or high-quality reviews to publish automatically.

Stats update on the Home dashboard. Total reviews, average rating (approved only), pending approval count.

A support request email, if the chat routed one. You’ll get an email with the customer’s contact details, the issue summary, and a copy of the relevant part of the conversation. Reply directly to the customer — the email is set up so your response goes to them, not back to us.

Next up

More pages are coming to cover:

• Photo prompts — when they appear, when they don’t, how to turn them off entirely
• Support routing — what triggers it, what you receive, and how to set escalation rules
• Draft review & submit — how the draft is generated and what customers can edit
• Resuming and abandonment — the 24-hour window and what happens to uploaded media
• Customizing the chat — colors, logo, copy, and the conversation editor
• Billing & limits — how we count conversations, what happens at the cap

Questions that this page didn’t answer? Email us at support@betterreviews.app. We read everything.