Problem Being Solved:
We have multiple brick-and-mortar locations, each with a Customer Care lead. We want them to be able to manage their store’s reputation without giving them access to Google My Business. We also want to proof their replies before posting publicly to Google (and notifying the reviewer of our response).
Solution:
Monday + Zapier, featuring restricted column views, filtered board views and automations.
We’ve been testing this board for 2 weeks now and are really pleased with the results.
How It Works & Flows:
Zapier listens to GMB for a new review. When detected, it creates a new item in Monday out of it. It can identify which store it belongs to so it gets assigned in Monday automatically to the Care Lead for that location. They can use the updates panel to look into an incident, or if all is well, simply type their response in the Response column, then mark it as Done. What happens next is only visible to the Regional team using restricted columns.
Monday then automatically notifies our Regional Care Lead and changes their Status column to Ready for Review. They check for spelling, make sure the message is on-brand, and if it’s unfavorable they can verify the customer was contacted directly. If they’re happy with it, they simply update their Status to Reviewed. Zapier sees that, grabs the information from the item and posts the response to the correct review.
Some Fun Stuff We Learned Along the Way:
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Using this method, Monday notifies us 10-20 minutes faster than the GMB app about new reviews. This gives us an edge in immediately following up on bad reviews.
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You may notice our Stars column is not a Ratings column. The Ratings column can’t be auto-populated by Zapier based on the number of stars given. This is actually a Formula column that works off an if-then, populated with the appropriate number of ★’s based on the numerical value of a hidden column (where Zapier can just drop a number). We wanted to keep the Star-Rating vibe alive, so this was a fun workaround we were happy with.
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Sometimes reviews get updated and there’s already a reply by us… and we need to know that. So this one isn’t immediately obvious, because in Zapier your sample data needs to have the reply data in it, otherwise it won’t respond with it. So we also have a hidden Reply Published Timestamp column, so we can treat those reviews differently when they come in.
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Moving between Groups - Reviews to Completed (accounts for issues with GMB - this one was important). So from the brick-and-mortar view, once they mark a review as Done, it does not move to Completed yet. They know this means it’s under review by the Regional team. It should only go to Completed once the reply is approved and posted to Google. But what if the reply doesn’t post to Google? We ran into this a couple times in testing - the reply would be sent to Google, it would not get posted, but Zapier would still move the item to Complete because the task was performed. This is another reason we created the hidden Reply Published Timestamp column. So the stack for the reply publishing looks like this: Item is Marked “Reviewed”, Item Information is Pulled, Reply Text is Sent to Google, 1 Minute Delay, Review is Checked for Reply Published Timestamp, If True Then Move to Completed, Else Update Status to Error. And if it errors out, honestly you just change the Status back to Reviewed, it starts the stack again and it’s never failed twice in a row.
A little quirky, but maaaaaaaan is it nice to just have this baked right into Monday for my teams. There’s probably a couple other bugs I’m forgetting that we overcame, but I thought some of you would find this helpful!
If anyone has any suggestions for improvement, or further questions about how we set this up, go for it.
Disclaimer: I’m not selling a service. I don’t work for Monday or Zapier. I won’t help you set yours up but I’m sure there’s a ton of people more qualified than me who would be happy to do that for you. I’m just here to help inspire and show Monday some love for such a versatile product. 
