Before you use review request (formerly post-interaction email or PIE) to solicit feedback from your customers, Bazaarvoice recommends that you test review requests in both your staging and production environments.

In staging

When testing a feed file in your staging environment, keep the following in mind:

  • Email addresses you use to test the process in staging must include appropriate domain names.
    • The domains in the email addresses must be whitelisted (with the exception of bazaarvoice.com).
    • Do not include real customer email addresses in the feed until the feed has been successfully tested.
  • Specify values in the feed from the staging product catalog, such as ProductPageURL.
  • Make sure transactions have different product IDs, email addresses, and transaction dates. Otherwise, the transactions are considered duplicate and a review request is not sent.

When you upload the feed to the staging server, be aware of the following limitations of the staging environment:

  • Bazaarvoice can only process 100,000 test transactions (per feed file) at any one time.
  • Review request delay is overwritten to zero (0) no matter what is specified in the review request settings.
  • Multiple review requests cannot be sent to the same email address within a 120-minute window.

In production

When testing a feed file in your production environment, keep the following in mind:

  • Include email addresses that are internal to your company only.
    • Provide one or more personal email addresses from domains such as gmail.com or hotmail.com to verify that security does not send review requests to a spam folder.
    • Do not include real customer email addresses in the feed until it has been successfully tested.
  • Specify values in the feed from the product catalog in production, such as ProductPageURL.
  • Back date transaction times in the feed by as many days as the review request delay has been configured. Or, set the review request delay to 0.
  • Limit the number of transactions in the feed to 100,000 or less.
  • Multiple review requests cannot be sent to the same email address within a 1440-minute window.
  • Preview any custom email templates that were created to make sure they show the correct images, text, and so on.
  • If possible, limit the amount of times you test review requests in production (ideally only once) in order to keep the analytics as accurate as possible.

When live

After you test your interaction feed is working on production, check the following:

  • Days to wait before sending the first review request
  • Days to wait before sending the review request reminder
  • Delay between multiple review requests for the same product (in days)
  • Schedule time to start sending review requests (UTC)