How to collect and manage ratings and reviews in Amelia

A customer finishes a massage on Friday afternoon, and the next day they get an email asking how it went. One click takes them to a short form where they pick a star rating and leave a few words about the experience. On your side, the review lands in Bookings → Ratings & Reviews, where you can read it, approve it, or reject it.

That is how Ratings & Reviews works in Amelia: once an approved appointment is over, Amelia emails the customer a unique rating link, and every submitted rating and review is collected in the admin area so you can moderate it and track how your employees and services are doing.

Ratings & Reviews is available in the Standard, Pro, and Elite license plans.

This is the first version of Ratings & Reviews, and the feature will be expanded in stages. Right now, ratings and reviews are collected and managed in the admin area only; showing them on your booking forms is planned for an upcoming version.

How do I enable Ratings & Reviews?

You enable Ratings & Reviews in Amelia → Features & Integrations. Open the Features tab, find the Ratings & Reviews card (typing “ratings” in the search field is the quickest way), and click Enable.

Once the feature is enabled, the card shows two buttons: Set up, which opens the feature settings, and Disable, which turns the feature off again whenever you need to.

Which Ratings & Reviews settings can I configure?

Click Set up on the Ratings & Reviews card to open the Configuration page. The top section, which controls how ratings and reviews are shown on your booking website (including the Rate what? option), is marked Coming soon and will become available in an upcoming update. Everything below it, covering written reviews and rating notifications, is active and explained in the sections that follow. Click Save once you’re done.

Can I make written reviews mandatory?

Yes. Enable Written review is required if you want customers to write a review every time they submit a rating. When this option is off, a star rating is enough, and the review field on the customer’s form is marked as optional.

How do I send rating links automatically?

Enable Auto-send rating link, and Amelia will automatically email each customer a unique rating link after their appointment. This toggle switches the Review request notification on or off, so with it disabled, no rating links are sent unless you send them manually. Use the Notification trigger dropdown to choose when the email goes out:

Appointment completed sends it as soon as the appointment ends.
1 hour after and 24 hours after send it with a fixed delay.
Custom lets you set your own delay with the Delay amount field and the Delay unit dropdown (Hours or Days).

When you save the settings, the Notification trigger you selected is copied to the Send after appointment field in the Review request template. The sync only works in that direction: if you later change the delay in the template, the template’s value is the one Amelia uses, and the Notification trigger in the settings won’t update to match.

The rating link is created at the moment the review request is sent, so it only works in notifications sent after that point.

How do I edit the review request email?

Click Edit notification template at the bottom of the Ratings & Reviews settings, and Amelia opens the Review request template in Amelia → Notifications. The template comes with default content (appointment details, the employee’s photo, a row of stars, and a Leave a review link), and you can edit all of it like any other Amelia notification.

The rating link itself comes from the %rating_link% placeholder, which you’ll find among the Appointment placeholders. You can hyperlink it behind any text or element, which is how the default template uses it behind the Leave a review text. The stars in the email work the same way: they’re a visual element linked to the rating page, so clicking a star opens the review form rather than submitting a rating.

The Send after appointment field at the top of the template sets when the email goes out, as described in the settings section above. Below the message content, you’ll also find the Don’t send reminders within the selected time option. When it’s enabled, the notification won’t be sent for bookings made within the selected Amount and Period before the appointment starts.

The Review request notification is a scheduled notification, so it requires a cron job on your website. If the cron job isn't set up, review requests won't be sent. Learn how to configure it in the Scheduled notifications documentation.

Which appointments can be rated?

Only appointments that are Approved and already finished can be rated. Amelia doesn’t send rating requests before or during an appointment, and appointments with the Pending status (or any status other than Approved) can’t be reviewed. Ratings & Reviews currently works for appointments only; events aren’t supported yet and will be added in a future update.

Each appointment can be rated once per customer, and only by the customer who attended it. For group appointments, Amelia sends a separate rating link to every customer who attended, so each of them can rate their own experience.

Rating requests are sent by email only, so customers who book without entering an email address will never receive one. If you want to collect ratings from every customer, make the Email field mandatory in your booking form. Learn how in the booking form customization documentation.

Can I send a rating request manually?

Yes. Go to Amelia → Bookings,edit the appointment you want reviewed, and click Send rating request. Amelia emails the customer the same Review request template, just on demand instead of automatically, which is handy when Auto-send rating link is turned off.

The button only appears for appointments that have already passed and have the Approved status. Once you click it, the button disappears, since each appointment can only be rated once.

What does the customer see when leaving a review?

When the customer clicks the stars or the Leave a review link in the email, a review page opens in a new tab. It shows the employee, the service, and the appointment date and time, followed by the star rating and the Review field. The customer picks a rating from one to five stars, writes a review if they want to (or if you’ve made it mandatory), and clicks Submit.

After submitting, the customer sees a Thank you for your review! message with their rating and review, plus a Book another appointment link. The rating link works only once, so if the customer opens it again, they’ll see a message that the review has already been submitted.

Where can I see and manage reviews?

All submitted ratings and reviews are in Amelia → Bookings, under the Ratings & Reviews tab. The summary cards at the top show Total reviews, Pending reviews, Approved reviews, and Average rating; the average rating is calculated from approved reviews only.

Below the cards, the Overview, Employees, Services, and Categories tabs let you look at your reviews as a whole or grouped per employee, service, or category. The table lists the customer, appointment date, employee, service, status, rating, and review text. If a customer submitted only a star rating, the review column shows a dash.

How do I approve or reject a review?

Use the status dropdown in the review’s row to set it to Approved, Pending, or Rejected. New reviews arrive as Pending, and you can leave them in that status if you only want to read them for now.

To see everything about a single review, click it to open the Rating & Review Details drawer. It shows the customer’s name and email address, the rating, the full review, the submission date, and the appointment details (employee, service, date, and time), and it has its own status dropdown so you can moderate the review from there as well.

How do I find specific reviews?

Type a keyword into Search reviews, or pick a Start date and End date to narrow the list to a period. Click the filter icon to filter reviews by Status, Rating, Employee, Service, Category, or Customer. You can also sort the table by clicking the arrows next to the Date, Status, and Rating column headers.

Combining filters is the fastest way to spot patterns, for example checking all low ratings for one employee in the last month.

Who can see and moderate ratings and reviews?

Only admins and users with the Amelia Manager role can view, approve, and reject ratings and reviews. Employees can’t see reviews in their Employee panel, and they can’t see them in the WordPress admin area either, even if they’re able to log into WordPress.

What isn’t available in Ratings & Reviews yet?

Since this is the first stage of the feature, a few things are planned but not included in the current version:

Ratings and reviews aren’t shown on the front end, so visitors to your booking website can’t see average ratings or reviews for your services or employees yet. The Rate what? option that controls this will become available in an upcoming update.
Only appointments can be rated; support for events will be added in a future update.
Reviews are approved or rejected one at a time, since bulk approval isn’t available.

Everything else covered on this page, from collecting ratings by email to moderating reviews in Bookings, is fully available now, and the remaining parts will arrive in upcoming versions.