Introduction
The ratings and reviews functionality is an omnichannel solution and is natively available as part of Dynamics 365 Commerce.
By implementing this functionality, you can help consumers make informed purchase decisions. It also lets retailers capture product reviews and ratings from customers in Commerce. Retailers can then use these ratings and reviews to provide a more direct experience by interacting with consumers through review responses, product quality information updates, and instructions. This information can then be shared with the remaining customers across different channels, creating an improved shopping experience.
A core part of Commerce is the service that captures ratings and reviews and does the processing of captured data and the aggregating of ratings, reviews, and concerns. The multi-tenant service is tightly coupled with the e-Commerce rendering platform. With this attribute, you can take advantage of the functionality natively so that when reviews are submitted, they are immediately processed through the cognitive service and an automated review validation.
After this process, the reviews become available for everyone to view them without having to wait for a human moderator to intervene. The same reviews can also be facilitated through moderators. After the processing and aggregation have finished, the data is taken into the operating system and the channel database, enabling the retail server to associate the rating summary along with the product information for category pages and lists. As a result, you would always have the rating summary along with the product information for your lists and search results. Because the data is ingested into the network and made available through the retail server connection, you are able to use the same information in the Store Commerce application and call center scenarios.
The reviews help improve the product quality, leading to improved sales. When a customer reviews a product, you can respond to that review and the response would be shown to the customer instantaneously. The response can be in the form of sharing information concerning the quality improvement of the product or educating them on how to use the product. That response would also be visible to all other customers instantaneously. That feature is one that is made possible through the moderation process.
Regarding the reviews, you can filter them on various categories and see only the ones that are important to you. Because any user can also report a concern on a review, you can filter the concerns on different parameters and, for example, only see the reviews that have concerns similar to those that were expressed by the users.
The following image shows how the ratings and reviews architecture is set up in Commerce.
The ratings and reviews service ties into Headquarters to make the aggregated data available to the different channels. It also connects to the Reviews Administration Tool, which is the service that you can use to analyze and moderate the review content before it is shared throughout the channels and made available to customers.