Recovering unhappy reviewers
Updated September 15, 2026
Someone left two stars and a real complaint. You can answer in public, but you cannot reach them: review sites do not hand over contact details. The recovery form closes that gap. You put a link in your reply, the reviewer opens it, sees the review it is about, and leaves a name plus an email or a phone number. That arrives as a survey response with the review attached, and the contact is added to the review so the rest of Pluspoint can work with it.
Before you start
- The recovery form is part of Surveys: it is available on every plan that includes surveys, and you need Surveys access to read what comes back.
- Inserting the link while replying needs Reviews access on a team covering the location.
- Nothing is created until a reviewer submits the form. There is no link to generate and nothing to set up first.
How the loop works
- A review arrives with a rating you want to act on.
- You reply and include the recovery form link, by hand, from a template, or through a Pulse AI rule.
- The reviewer opens the link and sees their own review at the top of the form.
- They leave a name, an email or a phone number, and optionally a message.
- The response appears in Surveys → All responses with the review attached, and the contact is added to the review.
- Your team handles it with the tools already on a response: a ticket, or a conversation in the inbox.
Add the link to a reply
Select Reply on any review, then select the recovery form button at the bottom left of the reply box, beside the AI assistant. It drops the link in at your cursor as a Recovery form chip; the real link is substituted when the reply goes out.
The button appears on every review with a star rating, whatever the source. A five-star reviewer who wants to be contacted is a perfectly good reason to send the form.
- On Google and iFood, the link replaces the placeholder when you select Publish.
- On every other review site, the link replaces the placeholder in the text Copy and open puts on your clipboard, so what you paste on the site is the real link.
You can also build the link into a saved reply template, alongside the reviewer name and location placeholders — see Reply templates. Template-based auto-reply rules substitute it the same way, so a template written once carries the link to every review the rule answers.
Each review has its own link, and it does not expire: the same link still works a year later, for as long as your plan includes surveys.
Let Pulse AI send it
A Pulse AI auto-reply rule has a Send recovery form toggle. With it on, replies to reviews rated 1 to 4 end by inviting the reviewer to leave their contact details on the form. Five-star reviews under the same rule are answered exactly as before, without the link.
The toggle cannot be switched on for a rule whose only Rating value is 5, because such a rule would never use it. See Auto-replies.
Write reply in the reply box does not depend on a rule: a draft for a review rated 1 to 4 ends with the link whenever your plan includes surveys, whatever the review site, and you can delete the chip before publishing. A matching rule only lends the draft its custom instructions.
What the reviewer sees
The form carries the location’s branding — logo, colours, font — the way survey pages do. Above the fields it shows the review it relates to: the rating, the reviewer’s display name, the review site, the date and the opening of the review text. Nobody has to confirm anything; the review itself says what the form is about.
The fields are fixed: a name, an email address or a mobile number (at least one of the two), an optional message, and the privacy consent checkbox. The page opens in the reviewer’s browser language when Pluspoint has it, otherwise in your account’s language, and the reviewer can switch languages. It is never indexed by search engines.
The form cannot be customised. Its wording is the same wording your negative survey feedback screen uses, so a business that has had its survey copy tailored gets the same wording here.
What lands in Pluspoint
A submission creates a survey response in Surveys → All responses, carrying:
- the Recovery form chip in place of a survey name,
- the review it came from, shown on the card with a link to open it in All reviews,
- the rating of the review, classified as a detractor, passive or promoter the way any survey rating is,
- the message, if one was written, and
- the contact, matched by email or phone number against your existing contacts, or created.
The contact is also added to the review, but only when the review has no contact yet. A contact your team or Pluspoint already attached is never replaced.
The usual complaint handling applies unchanged: the response appears in the recent-activity digest, and New conversation opens a conversation on any channel the location has. The negative-feedback SMS alert follows the same rule as survey responses: it goes out for a rating of 1 to 4 when the reviewer left a message, so a five-star submission, or one with contact details only, is picked up from the responses feed rather than by alert. See Managing survey responses.
Several people, one link
The link belongs to the review, not to a person, and it is public. More than one person can open and submit it — someone who was at the table, a family member, or a stranger who found the link in your public reply.
- Every submission becomes its own response, all of them attached to the same review.
- Only the first one adds its contact to the review. If it turns out to be the wrong person, unassign the contact on the review card and the next submission takes its place.
- A submission you do not want is an ordinary response. Close it as a ticket.
In the responses feed
Recovery responses are a group of their own, separate from your survey templates. In All responses, Filters → Surveys has a Recovery form entry. It is ticked by default; untick it to see template responses only.
They are not survey responses, so they stay out of Surveys → Analytics and out of the survey card on the home page. See Survey analytics.
Things worth knowing before you roll it out
| Situation | What happens |
|---|---|
| Your account has an automation triggered by Review left | Adding a contact to a review records the same activity a manual assignment does, so that automation will enrol a dissatisfied reviewer. Check what it sends before you put the link in a template or an AI rule |
| You edit or delete the reply that carried the link | The link is unaffected. The reviewer may already have seen it; there is no way to withdraw one |
| The review site shows your reply as plain text | Some sites do not turn URLs in owner replies into clickable links. The link is short and uses characters that are hard to confuse, so it can be typed by hand |
| The reviewer submits twice | Matching by email or phone finds the same contact, so you get two responses and one contact timeline |
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
The published reply contains [recovery_form] instead of a link | The text was pasted onto the review site from somewhere other than Copy and open | Edit the reply on the site and paste the link from a fresh Copy and open |
| A response has no linked review on its card | The link is dropped when the review is no longer in Pluspoint, so its absence does not mean the response came from a template survey | Check the chip: recovery responses are labelled Recovery form, with or without an attached review |
| The contact on the review is not the person who submitted the form | The review already had a contact, or an earlier submission claimed it | Unassign the contact on the review card, then assign the right one |
| Pulse AI replies do not include the link | The rule’s Send recovery form toggle is off, the review is rated 5, or another rule matched the review first | Open the newest rule covering that location, rating and review type |
| Publishing a reply says the recovery form is not available for this review | Your plan does not include surveys, your subscription has lapsed, or the review has no star rating | Remove the placeholder from the reply. Template auto-replies drop it on their own |
| Publishing a reply says it contains a placeholder that can’t be filled in | A Pulse AI rewrite (Translate, Change tone, …) altered a placeholder, or one was typed by hand | Delete the text named in the message; to add the link again, use the recovery form button |
| Write reply says the draft came back with unfilled placeholders | Pulse AI wrote a variable name such as company_email in place of a detail it did not have, three times in a row | Select Write reply again. The same check keeps such drafts out of auto-replies |