The Tasks Inbox brings together all review-related tasks in one place — response tasks assigned to you, generative responses awaiting your approval, and first-party review removal requests. This article covers how approvals work, how to set up users with the right permissions, and how to action on tasks.
How Approvals Work
Approvals add a review step between writing a response and posting it. This is useful when you want to scale your response program to more users while maintaining brand control — for example, allowing local managers to suggest responses that a corporate team approves before they go live.
When a user with suggestion-only permissions responds to a review, the response enters an approval queue instead of posting immediately. A user with approval permissions then reviews the suggestion and either approves or rejects it.
Common use cases include the following:
- Local managers or franchisees suggest responses that a corporate team approves
- Customer care teams suggest responses that a legal or compliance team approves before posting in regulated industries
- Generative responses are reviewed by a human before posting
Set Up Users for Approvals
Two types of users are required for the approvals workflow: one who suggests responses and one who approves them.
Suggesters need the Review Response with Approval permission. The built-in Customer Care Requester and Content Requester roles include this permission. Note that these roles can respond using review response assets without approval — approval is only required for freeform and templated responses.
Approvers need the Approve Review Responses permission. The built-in Full Control and Account Manager roles include this permission. You can also create a custom role with this permission specifically for approvers who should not have access to other areas of the platform.
Both the suggester and approver need the View Reviews permission for the relevant entities.
For steps on creating users and custom roles, see Add a New User.
Suggest a Review Response
If your permissions require approval, the response process works the same way as a standard response — the difference is in the button you see at the end.
In the Tasks Inbox, the button reads Send for Approval. In the Monitoring and Response tabs, the Respond button is replaced with Suggest Response or Suggest Comment for Facebook Recommendations.
Click the button to submit your suggested response. A review response approval task is created and assigned to the designated approver.
Approve or Reject a Response
- Navigate to Inbox > My Tasks.
- Locate the review response approval task. Filter for Type = Review Response Approval to find them quickly.
- Review the suggested response alongside the original review.
- Take one of the following actions:
- Click Approve to publish the response to the publisher site
- Click Reject to prevent the response from being published. You must provide a reason for rejection, which appears in the Conversations tab of the task so the suggester can see it.
- Click on the Conversations tab to add a comment without approving or rejecting
To view the history of a task, click the Activity Log tab.
Approve Generative Responses via Email
If a generative reply workflow rule assigns an external user as the approver — someone without a Yext account — they receive an email with the review details and the generated response. They can approve, reject, or edit the response directly from the email without logging in to Yext.
Review Removal Approval Tasks
When a user flags a first-party review for removal, an unassigned review removal approval task is created. Users with review removal permissions can action on these tasks from the Inbox.
To action on a review removal task:
- Navigate to Inbox > My Tasks.
- Locate the review removal approval task.
- Take one of the following actions:
- Click Remove to remove the review from the platform and unpublish it
- Click Keep to reinstate the review to its pre-flagged status. You must provide a reason for keeping the review, which appears in the Conversations tab.
Manually Assign a Review Response Task
In addition to workflow rules, you can manually assign a review to a specific user as a task.
- Navigate to Reviews > Monitoring or Reviews > Response.
- Click the plus icon next to the review you want to assign.
- Click Select Assignee and choose the user from the dropdown.
- (Optional) Enter a comment to send to the assignee with the task.
- Click Create.