How Review Flows Work

What Are Review Flows?

A Review Flow is a guided customer experience. Customers move through the stages enabled by your configuration—whether that leads to Google, another external destination, written feedback, or direct completion.

At its core, a review flow is built to do two things: help satisfied customers leave public reviews, and give everyone else a better option than posting publicly.

But because any destination can be a link and the feedback form is fully customizable, review flows are flexible enough to power much more than review collection. The same structure can be adapted for:

Review collection — the core use case, routing customers to Google, Facebook, or any review site
Social media growth — using link destinations to drive Instagram follows, YouTube subscribers, or TikTok engagement
Testimonial collection — disabling review sites, collecting direct feedback, and publishing standout responses on your website or marketing material
Employee recognition — enabling employee selection so customers can call out specific team members
Sentiment and satisfaction surveys — using the rating stage as a sentiment score and direct feedback as the open-ended follow-up
Referral and content paths — using followup destinations or Rich Editor Customer destinations to hand customers off to another Flow, Form, Page, or business link

This page focuses on how the core flow works from the customer’s perspective and how your configuration shapes what they see.

Why It Matters

Review flows are one of the core tools in FSRevs. Understanding how they work helps you:

Build flows that match your business goals
Choose the right settings during setup
Create a smoother path to both external destinations and written feedback

The Strategy Behind the Flow

Every customer interaction is an opportunity to learn something valuable — and to direct that value in the right direction.

A review flow is designed to help you do two things at once:

Encourage public advocacy when a customer is ready to leave a review
Offer a direct written-feedback path when a customer would rather respond inside the flow

This allows the same flow to support reputation growth, team recognition, and service recovery. Written feedback is not inherently private: approved responses may later be used as testimonials or displayed through Public Pages and widgets according to your publishing and consent settings.

That flexibility — making it easy for different kinds of feedback to reach the right destination — is one of the most valuable things a well-configured review flow can provide.

How the Review Flow Works

A review flow can include up to five stages, but it can be as simple or as detailed as you need. Some businesses may send customers straight to Google with no extra steps, while others may choose to collect contact details, sentiment, employee attribution, testimonials, profile photos, or other helpful information along the way. Because each flow is highly configurable, you can shape the experience around your goals and refine it over time.

Stage 1: Location Selection

Purpose: Connect the customer’s response to the correct location so your team can track performance, recognize great work, and spot issues more accurately.

Shown when:

More than one location could apply
The location has not already been defined in the flow or link

Skipped when:

The flow is assigned to a single location
The location is already preselected in the QR code, smart link, SMS, or email
The customer is continuing a Journey that already has a valid location

What the customer does: They select the location they visited in a quick first step designed to keep friction low.

Stage 2: Details & Context — The Identity & Sentiment Layer

Purpose: Gather the customer details and added context that support follow-up, recognition, and more meaningful feedback.

Depending on your settings, this stage can include:

Required or optional name, email, and mobile phone fields
Optional, separate email and SMS marketing choices beside valid contact values
A sentiment selection using the star widget or Customer Recommendation Score widget
Employee selection
Custom guidance or prompts to help frame the response

This stage is highly flexible. You can use it to collect valuable context before the customer continues, or skip it entirely when a faster, lower-friction experience is more important.

If only optional customer-information fields are shown, choosing Continue remembers that choice so the same blank fields do not interrupt a reload or resumed record. Browser Back still restores the historical Details screen and allows the customer to add an optional value. A full reload rebuilds the Flow at its furthest valid stage.

Why this stage matters: A rating adds structured experience data before destination choices or only alongside written feedback, depending on the selected timing. When Team Member Attribution is customer-selectable, the selector appears only when an eligible team member exists.

Shown when: Enabled in the flow configuration.

What the customer does: They fill in the information you have chosen to request. If marketing permission is configured, they can independently choose email, SMS, both, or neither.

Stage 3: Options & Next Steps — The Decision Gateway

Purpose: Present the next paths available to the customer based on how your flow is configured.

This stage can include:

Review site options, such as Google or Facebook
A written-feedback or testimonial option
Links to other destinations, including your website, social pages, or other custom pages

You can also add supporting text and images here to give customers more context and help guide the kind of response you want to encourage.

This stage is highly flexible. Some businesses offer several paths, while others prefer a single destination. If your flow is set up to send customers straight to one place, this stage can be skipped entirely for a faster experience.

Why this stage matters: For many customers, this will be the final step in the flow. If they choose a direct feedback path, they continue to Stage 4. If they choose an external destination such as Google, they may leave the flow at that point.

Shown when: More than one next-step option is enabled.

What the customer does: They choose how they want to continue.

Stage 4: Direct Feedback — The Insight Engine

Purpose: Collect written feedback, testimonials, and other customer-generated content directly inside the flow.

This stage can include:

Written feedback or testimonials
A configured required or optional mobile phone number
An optional tagline or category
Photo uploads
Additional content prompts, if enabled

When a customer provides direct feedback, their name, public display name, and email address are always collected and required. A mobile phone number can also be configured as required or optional. These same phone rules apply when Written Feedback is offered as a fallback because no eligible external destination is available. This helps connect feedback to a real customer, supports follow-up when needed, and gives you the information required to display submitted content appropriately if it is used publicly.

If configured, this stage can also request email or SMS marketing permission beside the applicable contact value. Permission already granted for the same value is not requested again.

Why this stage matters: This stage is most often used for direct feedback, but it can also support other types of customer-generated content. Depending on how you configure it, you can use it to collect testimonials, photos, answers to guided prompts, or other content that supports your website, social media, and marketing efforts. It is a flexible way to gather more useful, more structured responses than a simple public review alone.

Shown when:

The customer chooses a direct feedback path
Direct feedback is enabled as part of the flow
External review and social links are enabled, but the resolved Location has no eligible destination and Written Feedback becomes the fallback

Skipped when:

The customer selects a review site or other external destination
Direct feedback is disabled and an eligible external destination remains available
Both external destinations and direct feedback are disabled

What the customer does: They provide the requested information, share their feedback or content, and submit it.

The phone field is part of this existing stage; it does not add another screen or change the five-stage structure.

Stage 5: Completion

Purpose: End the current Flow, or guide the customer into the next touchpoint.

This stage can be as simple as a thank-you message or branded success page, or it can send the customer to a review site, social page, offer, mailing list, external website, or even the start of another flow.

Why this stage matters: Completion is not always the end of the experience. It can also serve as the bridge into whatever comes next — a second review site, a loyalty program, a referral request, a piece of content, or another guided experience. Connecting resources with Smart Links and managed Customer destinations can turn a single response into the beginning of a longer customer relationship.

How Configuration Shapes the Flow

The same Review Flow can create very different customer experiences depending on how it is configured. We will go into more detail about what each setting does in the Creating a Review Flow section, but the examples below show a few simple ways your settings can shape its stages.

Configuration	Customer Experience
Rating before choices, written feedback enabled, Google + Facebook configured	Customer rates the experience, then chooses an external destination or written feedback.
Rating disabled, written feedback off, Google only	Customer is sent directly to Google when the shortcut conditions apply.
Rating only with written feedback, no eligible destinations	Written-feedback fallback activates and the customer provides a rating with that response.
Multi-location flow with employee tracking enabled	Customer selects a location, identifies the employee who helped them, shares sentiment, then continues to the next available path

Key Settings

Review Site Ordering

You control the order in which review sites appear. This can significantly influence where customers choose to leave their reviews.

Conditional Stages

Not every stage appears in every flow:

Single-location flows skip the location selection stage
A flow with no eligible external destinations can activate written-feedback fallback
Flows without direct feedback skip Stage 4 entirely

Review Flows can be configured in many different ways. Some are designed to gather more context, such as customer details, sentiment, employee attribution, or other useful information for follow-up and analysis. Others are intentionally kept as short and frictionless as possible. The right setup depends on your goals, and the same system can support a wide range of customer experiences.

Customer Identity

FSRevs automatically creates or matches customer records using the information collected during the flow. When a customer has interacted with your business before, their new activity is connected to their existing record, making it easier to keep customer history accurate and organized.

When a customer selects a configured marketing choice, FSRevs records permission only when it can safely associate the response with a customer. Permission applies to the exact email address or phone number shown and remains separate by channel. See Marketing Permission for setup details.

You can view and manage your customer records in the Customers section of the portal.

Flow Activity Records

System-sent requests create their Review Record before dispatch so the request retains its historical Flow and Location. Reusable Smart Links may defer record creation until the customer meaningfully interacts; crawlers or an abandoned first page therefore do not necessarily create activity. Once created, the record can show its observed Customer Journey and can be viewed in Flow Activity.

A Smart Link can rotate new visitors across several destinations. Once a Review Record begins, it remains pinned to the destination that originally opened it even if the Smart Link’s active rotation changes.

Manage and Measure a Flow

Open an existing Flow Builder to use its permission-aware workspace:

Reports summarizes funnel, outcomes, destinations, delivery, and attribution.
Activity shows records locked to the selected Flow, with optional location context.
Build & Configure shows editable settings or a read-only configuration summary.
Team Notifications manages staff notifications when your access includes them.

See Flow & Form Reports and Creating a Review Flow.

Practical Examples

Review flows are flexible enough to support a wide range of customer engagement goals:

A restaurant uses a flow built around the dining experience, inviting guests to share what stood out about their meal and compliment the team member who made the visit memorable before continuing to the next step.
A service business lets customers identify the technician, advisor, or staff member who helped them, so feedback and recognition stay connected to the right person.
A multi-location business uses one shared flow while still routing customers to the correct location, review page, and follow-up experience.
A brand focused on customer content uses direct feedback to collect testimonials, photos, and other customer-generated material that can support its website, social media, and marketing efforts.
A business focused on long-term relationships uses the completion step to guide customers to what comes next — another flow, a referral page, a rewards program, or a social media destination.

These are just a few examples of what is possible. To explore more ideas and see how different flow strategies can work in practice, visit the Recipes section.

Creating a Review Flow — Step-by-step creation guide
Review Flow Settings Guide — Detailed settings reference
Followup Destinations — What happens after completion
Sending Requests — How to send flows to customers

Next Step

Now that you understand how a review flow works from the customer’s perspective, the next step is to learn how to build one.

Continue to Creating a Review Flow to see how each setting shapes the experience from the setup side.