Reply Approvals

Replies are critical when dealing with feedback about your brand or business on social. The faster the reply, the better the customer service and the more likely audiences are to engage with your brand again and again.

The Reply Approvals workflow enables oversight into message and review replies to ensure your responses to your audience are on-brand, compliant and error-free. More consumers are turning to social media for customer service and the caliber of support is important. Reply Approvals give you and your team a dedicated space in the Smart Inbox, and Reviews tab, along with a seamless workflow, to organize and track replies to both public and private messages.

Note: You must have the Needs Approval, Can Reply or Full Publishing profile permissions to submit replies for approval.

Looking for our Reply Approvals workflow for mobile? Check out this helpful article.

Reply Approval Notifications 

Sprout recommends turning turning on email notifications to stay on top of your Reply Approvals. You receive both in-app and email notifications when you’re sent a reply approval or when your reply gets approved, rejected or deleted.

Approvers can leave notes for rejected replies and these notes appear in your notification email.

Submitting a reply for approval 

When messages come in, whether public mentions, private messages or reviews, it’s important to post a reply quickly to your audiences. 

As a best practice, enter multiple replies to give your Approver a variety to choose from. You can’t edit replies once you submit them, and this can cause a delay in how quickly a response can get out to your audience. With multiple options to choose from, Approvers can select which response is best for the message, without worrying about edits. 

To submit a reply for approval:

1. Navigate to the Smart Inbox or Reviews tab.
2. Select the message or review you want to respond to.
3. Click , and then enter your response.
   
   
4. Click the Select an Approver dropdown to select people on your team to review your message. Note: If you select multiple Approvers, only one Approver needs to approve the reply to send it.
5. Click the drop-down in the bottom-right of the response message, and then click Submit for Approval.

When replying to Reviews, it's important to note that you can only send one reply per review. If there's a pending reply waiting for approval on a Review, and you attempt to send a reply directly, you'll see a warning notification that any outstanding pending replies will be deleted.

Responding to replies 

If you’re an Approver, you receive a notification in the Notifications Drawer or via email when a reply is awaiting your approval, depending on your notification settings. 

To respond to a reply:

1. Click the notification, and then click View pending reply. The Message appears in the Smart Inbox.
2. Decide the course of action you want to take for the reply.
   • Click to approve the reply and publish it.
     • Note: If you approve a reply with multiple pending replies, a popup appears to alert you of the potential reply conflict. Click to Approve this reply, reject others or Approve this reply, keep others.
   • Click to reject the reply and provide reasoning as to why the reply wasn't appropriate.
   • Click to delete the reply and write a new reply.

Viewing Reply Approvals

You can check the status of Reply Approvals in the Reply Approval tab. In this tab you can see pending, approved and rejected replies to your inbound messages. You can also view reply rejections directly from a message in the Smart Inbox.

To view Reply Approvals:

1. Navigate to the Smart Inbox tab.
2. Click Reply Approval on the left-hand navigation panel.
   
   
3. Search your Reply Approvals by selecting Newest to Oldest or Oldest to Newest from the drop-down at the top of the screen.
4. Filter your Reply Approvals by:
   
   
   • Approval Status - select Pending, Approved or Rejected.
   • Authors - select the author's name or search for the author's name in the Refine Authors search bar.
   • Approvers - select the Approver's name or search for the Approver's name in the Approvers dropdown.

To view a reply rejection directly from a message:

1. Navigate to the Smart Inbox tab.
2. Click the message you want to open. 

From the reply window, you can view why a response was rejected and the reason for the rejection. From here you can craft a new message response based on the rejection reason.

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