Key Concepts & Glossary

What This Is

A reference to FSRevs terminology, with links to the guides for each feature.

How the Pieces Fit Together

Your workspace contains your business’s locations and team. You build a Review Flow or Custom Form, then send an individual request or share a reusable Smart Link. Results appear in Activity and can be connected to a Customer record.

If you want to…	Start with…
Collect feedback or offer review destinations	Review Flows
Ask your own questions or collect uploads	Custom Forms
Share a reusable URL or QR code	Smart Links
Inspect one response or delivery problem	Flow Activity or Form Responses
Preserve internal context or assign follow-up	Team Workspace
Publish selected customer feedback	Public Pages or Review Showcases

Core Concepts

Workspace

Your workspace is everything in your FSRevs account — it’s the top-level container that holds your entire business. Your locations, team members, customers, flows, forms, links, branding, and data all live inside your workspace. It’s where your team does their work, and where your customers go through the review flows and experiences you create.

When you signed up and chose a Workspace Name (for example, ems or rosies), FSRevs normalized it into the unique address used by your portal, smart links, and other customer-facing experiences.

See Creating Your Account for details on setting up your workspace.

Locations

A location represents a business branch or service area. Locations organize business details, resource availability, team access, and reporting. Branding and Public Page Settings also support local overrides of global defaults.

Every FSRevs account has at least one location. One location is always marked as the primary location.

See Understanding Locations and Managing Locations for details.

Review Flows

A review flow is a multi-step experience you design for your customers. Despite the name, review flows are much more than just collecting reviews — they’re flexible engagement tools that can be tailored in many ways.

A review flow can include any combination of:

Sentiment capture — Ask customers how they feel about their experience
Review site links — Direct customers to leave reviews on Google, Facebook, or other platforms
Social links — Encourage customers to follow you on social media
Custom links — Send customers anywhere — a booking page, loyalty program, or any URL
Direct feedback — Collect written feedback, suggestions, or concerns directly in FSRevs
Photo collection — Let customers share photos of their experience
Employee attribution — Track which team member the experience was with

The builder provides a defined experience with configurable sections and timing choices. Enable the parts you need; use a Custom Form when you need your own set of questions and fields.

The customer experience does not have to stop when the Flow ends. Review Flows can use followup destinations that send customers into another Flow, a Custom Form, a Simple Page, or a My Link.

Review flows are also a powerful source of marketing and social content. With content-use permission, you can collect customer photos, testimonials, and stories — then publish them to your website through review showcases, feature them on your public page, or export them for use in social media campaigns and marketing materials.

See How Review Flows Work for the full guide.

Sentiment

Sentiment is a lightweight satisfaction signal collected during a review flow. It can be captured with the standard star widget or the Customer Recommendation Score widget, giving you structured data you can sort, compare, and trend over time.

Unlike written feedback, sentiment is fast to aggregate. Unlike public review behavior, it gives you an internal signal you control. That makes it useful when you want to better understand the customer experience across your business.

Sentiment can help you:

Compare results across locations
Spot patterns tied to specific employees when employee tracking is enabled
See which services, campaigns, or flow setups create stronger customer experiences
Identify which responses may need follow-up and which may be strong candidates for testimonials or public visibility
Build a simple internal benchmark you can review over time

Sentiment is most valuable when you plan to use it as an operating signal. It can help reveal trends, surface weaker experiences earlier, and show where your strongest customer outcomes are happening.

Just as importantly, it is optional. Every extra step adds some friction, so some businesses choose to collect sentiment for insight, while others keep the flow faster and simpler.

Sentiment should not be treated as a perfect grade for a location, employee, or service. It is a signal, not a verdict.

See Review Flow Settings Guide for the configuration options.

Employee Attribution

Employee attribution connects a customer interaction to the specific team member involved. When used well, it adds context that helps you understand not just what happened, but who was part of the experience.

That can be useful when you want to:

Connect feedback, reviews, and sentiment to the right employee
Support coaching, recognition, and internal follow-up with better context
Compare patterns across employees, locations, services, or campaigns
Understand whether an issue looks isolated or more widespread

Employee attribution is most valuable when the connection is accurate and appropriate for how the business actually operates. In some businesses, that relationship is clear. In others, customers may interact with multiple staff members, teams, or rotating roles, which can make single-person attribution less reliable.

That is why employee attribution is optional. The right setup depends on balancing three things:

Visibility into who was involved
Friction added to the customer experience
Accuracy of the attribution itself

Used thoughtfully, employee attribution can make customer experience data much more operational. Used carelessly, it can create messy or misleading data.

Employee attribution should also be interpreted responsibly. It is a useful signal for context, coaching, and recognition, not a perfect score for employee performance.

See Review Flow Settings Guide for the configuration options.

Custom Forms

A custom form is a flexible data-collection tool you build from customer fields, questions, uploads, and display-only content.

Custom forms aren’t limited to customer feedback — they can be sent to anyone. Use them for:

Customer surveys — Post-visit satisfaction surveys or detailed feedback
Employee forms — Internal checklists, incident reports, or performance evaluations
Vendor forms — Supplier questionnaires or procurement requests
Intake forms — New client onboarding or service request forms

Like review flows, custom forms are standalone experiences that can be sent via request or accessed through a smart link. They have their own followup destinations, so completing a form can lead into a review flow, another form, or any other destination.

Custom Forms and Review Flows can be combined into Customer Journeys — for example, a customer completes a Review Flow and then moves into a detailed survey Form.

See How Custom Forms Work for the full guide.

Smart Links

A smart link is a short, memorable URL that can point to one or several Review Flows, Custom Forms, simple pages, or websites. Smart links look like your-workspace.fsrevs.com/go/review and are one of the most versatile tools in FSRevs.

What makes smart links powerful:

Update without reprinting — Add, remove, or replace destinations without changing the Base URL.
Distribute visits — Rotate new visitors equally across several available destinations.
Track engagement — Compare Base URL, configuration, destination, campaign, and customer-outcome results.
Add reusable context — Give a location, employee, sender, or campaign its own saved configuration URL.
Multiple formats — Use smart links as a plain URL, generate QR codes from them, or use them in NFC tap-to-open experiences on phones and signage.
Easy to control — Enable, disable, or redirect any smart link instantly from the portal.

Smart links are the primary way customers access your flows and forms outside of direct email/SMS requests.

See Smart Links for the full guide.

Flow Activity

Flow activity records customer interaction with a review flow. A record is created when a request is prepared or after a reusable Smart Link visit reaches meaningful interaction, then captures what happens during that experience.

From a flow activity record you can see:

The customer’s rating, feedback, and any photos they submitted
Which review-site links they clicked; a click does not prove they published a review on that external site
The employee linked to the request and who sent it
Tracked email or SMS status and message history, including replies linked to that request when available
An activity log of recorded events in the Flow
Any images or content the customer provided with content-use permission, ready to use in your campaigns

You can also edit feedback, save a public reply, set Public/Private visibility (with the proper permissions), and publish eligible testimonials through review showcases, public pages, and other configured surfaces.

Authorized team members can export filtered activity for reporting and analysis. Permission to view or export data does not automatically grant permission to market to the customer or publish their content.

Open a Review Flow’s Activity action to work with that Flow’s records. For activity across accessible Review Flows, use View all review activity on the dashboard. See Flow Activity for the full guide, including Message History and Activity Logs.

Form Responses

Form responses are the records of submissions to your custom forms. Each response captures the data the respondent entered, along with rich context about the interaction.

From a form response you can see:

The submitted data — all answers to your form’s questions
The employee and location linked to the response, if applicable
Which followup was shown and the observed Journey recorded after submission
Any images and content gathered with content-use permission — a great source of material for social media campaigns, marketing collateral, and contests

Form response data is also fully exportable with the same powerful filtering and column selection as flow activity.

Open a Custom Form’s Activity action to work with that Form’s responses. For responses across accessible Custom Forms, use View all form activity on the dashboard. See Form Responses for details.

Data Exporting

Both flow activity and form responses can be exported with extensive customization. Use the filter controls to narrow your data to exactly what you need, then export with your choice of columns — from core review data and customer identity to organizational context and delivery status.

Exports produce spreadsheets for use in external reporting and analysis tools. Choose only the columns you need. For marketing contact lists, use the Customer export’s Marketable columns rather than assuming every saved email or phone has permission.

See Exporting Data for a complete guide to filters, available columns, and export workflows.

Followups

A followup is what happens after a customer completes a flow or form. You configure the followup destination when building your flow or form. Options include:

A review or social site — Redirect the customer to leave a review on Google, leave feedback on Facebook, or visit any of your linked platforms. See Managing Your Links.
A simple page — Show a branded page you build through FSRevs, with rich content blocks, videos, links, and more. See Simple Pages.
A smart link — Start a new interaction or continue an existing Journey by directing into another Flow or Form. See Smart Links.
Any external URL — Redirect to any site on the internet — your own website, a booking page, a loyalty program, or any other tool you use. This is a powerful way to extend customer engagement beyond FSRevs.

See Followup Destinations for the full guide.

Customer Journeys

A Customer Journey is the path FSRevs actually observed across Review Flows, Custom Forms, Simple Pages, Smart Links, and My Links. You configure possible Connections through completion settings, Rich Editor Customer destinations, Link Lists, and Smart Link assignments.

The observed Journey on a Review Record or Form Response contains only the steps that customer entered. It remains separate from the possible Connections shown on configuration resources.

See Customer Journeys for routing, continuation, and timeline details.

Links connect your FSRevs account to external platforms. They’re organized into three categories:

Review Links — Platforms where customers leave reviews (Google, Facebook, and other review platforms)
Social Links — Your social media profiles (Instagram, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
Custom Links — Any other destination (booking pages, loyalty programs, websites, etc.)

Links are used throughout FSRevs — in review flows, on Public Pages, and as followup destinations. You manage them all from My Links in System Configuration. See Managing Your Links for details.

Customers

A Customer record groups a person’s contact methods and linked activity. You can add Customers yourself, and FSRevs can identify or create them from requests and submissions when contact information resolves safely. Matching names alone do not prove that two people are the same customer.

The Customer workspace shows linked activity you are authorized to access. Unmatched or ambiguous responses may remain separate, so it is not a guarantee that every visit by that person appears there.

See Customers for details on viewing and managing customer records.

Message Templates

Message templates control the content of emails and text messages sent to customers when you send review or form requests. FSRevs provides sensible default templates, but the real power is in customization.

You can create custom templates for each channel (email and SMS) and purpose: Review Requests, email Review Reminders, and Form Requests. Dynamic variables insert available customer names, business details, and the recipient’s unique request link.

Choose the saved template in the relevant Flow or Form’s message settings. Template availability controls where it can be selected; creating a globally available template does not automatically replace every Flow’s selected content.

See Message Templates for the full guide.

Team Workspace

The Team Workspace has four types of internal records:

Notes preserve context, decisions, and conversations.
Tasks (Beta) track work that needs an owner or progress status.
Issues (Beta) keep problems, blockers, and risks visible.
Reminders (Beta) organize future follow-up your team does not want to miss.

All four can be attached to a Customer or kept unattached, scoped company-wide or to a location, and shared with the Team, kept Private, or limited to Managers Only. Tasks, Issues, and Reminders also add assignees, action statuses, and optional due dates.

See Notes and Tasks, Issues & Reminders (Beta) for details.

Branding

Branding controls how your flows, forms, and public pages look to customers. You can set your logo, brand colors, and header layout. Branding can be configured globally or overridden per location.

See Branding for details.

Public Pages

A public page presents your business details and eligible public feedback on BestLocalReviews.com. It provides a shareable destination for customers to learn about your business and read selected testimonials.

Publishing makes that content available on the public page. It does not guarantee a search ranking, an AI recommendation, or inclusion in an AI model’s training data.

Each location can have its own public page with customizable settings — control which reviews are displayed, show or hide reviewer photos, taglines, owner replies, and additional media. You can also feature your review and social links to drive further engagement.

See Public Pages for the full configuration guide.

Simple Pages

Simple pages are quick, easy-to-build web pages where you can publish content to the internet using your FSRevs branding. They’re commonly used as followup destinations after a flow or form, but they can also stand alone as shareable pages.

Simple pages use a block-based editor with several content types:

Rich text blocks — Use the Rich Editor for formatted content, Customer destinations, and images
Link list blocks — Offer managed Review Flows, Custom Forms, Simple Pages, Smart Links, or My Links as clickable choices
Video embeds — Embed YouTube or Vimeo videos
Click-to-copy blocks — Text that customers can copy with one click (great for promo codes or instructions)

Each simple page is branded to your business and can be assigned to a specific location. You can also generate smart links that point directly to your simple pages.

See Simple Pages for the full page-building guide and Rich Editor for formatting, links, and images.

Review Showcases

Review Showcases display eligible public feedback as a hosted Page, an Embed on your website, or both. This is the area formerly called Review Widgets. Automatic selections can include new matching public feedback; curated selections show the records you choose. New showcases default to including only selected Review Flows.

Showcases offer:

Three responsive layouts — Simple editorial stack, Cloud gallery, or Guestbook entries
Filtering — Show reviews from specific locations, flows, or employees
Curated mode — Hand-pick and order exactly which testimonials to display
Display options — Control star ratings, reviewer photos, taglines, owner replies, additional photos, and more
Pagination — Choose simple or detailed pagination styles
Page & QR — Share a Page while at least one working Smart Link points to it
Leave Feedback — Optionally invite visitors to start a selected Review Flow from a Page or Embed

Showcase Pages are excluded from search indexing. The separate BestLocalReviews.com Public Page is your search-facing business presence. An enabled showcase can be embedded without enabling a hosted Page.

See Review Showcases for sharing, embedding, and styling, and Showcase Settings for configuration.

Responsibilities Overview

FSRevs separates account readiness from responsibilities. Activation determines whether a person can sign in; responsibilities determine what protected work they can do after sign-in.

Responsibility	What it allows
System owner	Business-wide authority, including owner-level account management
Administrator	Management of every location, users, workspace configuration, data, and exports
Location manager	Management of assigned locations, including their users, configuration, data, and exports
Send for others	Sending as another person and working with records sent by other people
Send requests	Sending Review Flow and Custom Form requests and working with that person’s own requests
Employee tracking	Makes the person available for employee attribution and performance reporting without granting data access
Data access	Access to authorized response and customer data, notes, exports, reporting, and Flow/Form notifications

Responsibilities apply at All locations or Specific locations where that responsibility supports it. Owner is workspace-wide, and the same management responsibility is called Administrator at all locations and Location manager at specific locations. Employee tracking remains independent. See Roles & Permissions and Managing Users for details.

Portal Section	What You’ll Find
Customer Engagement	Review Flow and Custom Form directories
Team Workspace	Notes and Tasks, Issues & Reminders (Beta)
Customer Interactions	Customers and other customer records
Content Management	Public Page Settings, Simple Pages, Review Showcases
System Configuration	Review sites, smart links, message templates
Global Settings	Locations, Users, branding, and account setup
Reports & Analytics	Dashboard, Google Performance, Request Activity, Team Performance, Flow/Form reporting, Smart Link analytics, sender tracking, and Manager Feedback Report

Google Connections and Reviews

A public Google review link, a connected Google account, and a user’s FSRevs role serve different purposes. The link sends customers to Google; the confirmed connection lets FSRevs access the selected listing; the role determines which team members can view or manage it. Google reviews remain separate from feedback and form responses collected in FSRevs.

Start with Google Business Profile for the full workflow.

What is FSRevs? — Product overview
Creating Your Account — Get started
Setting Up Your Business — First-time setup walkthrough