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If you advertise on Yelp, you already know the pattern. A Request a Quote comes in at 7:40 in the evening, you see it the next morning, and by then the customer has already talked to two other companies. Yelp knows this too, which is why it nudges you about response time and shows a response badge on your profile.
An auto responder is the usual first fix. This walkthrough covers what Yelp gives you out of the box, where that stops being useful, and how to set up a reply that does more than acknowledge the message.
What Yelp already does for you
Inside Yelp for Business you can turn on an automated response to Requests. You write one message, and every new request gets it. That is worth switching on today if you have nothing, because a fast acknowledgement is better than silence and it protects your response time.
Set it up like this:
- Open Yelp for Business and go to your Messages or Leads section.
- Find the automated response or auto reply setting for Request a Quote.
- Write a short message in your own voice, not a template you copied.
- Save it and send yourself a test request from another account if you can.
Keep the message under about four lines. Say who you are, confirm you got the request, and ask for the single most useful piece of information. For a plumber that is usually the address and whether water is currently running. For a cleaner it is square footage and how often.
Where the native auto responder stops
The built in reply sends once, and then nothing happens. That is the whole limitation, and it matters more than it sounds:
- It sends the same text to a burst pipe at midnight and a routine quote request.
- It cannot answer the customer's follow up question, so if they reply "how much for a two bedroom" the thread goes quiet again until a person reads it.
- It does not know your prices, hours, or service area, so it cannot give the price anchor that keeps someone from calling the next company.
- It does not follow up when a customer reads your message and does not respond.
- It does not tell you which requests are real and which are solicitation.
In practice you end up with a faster acknowledgement and the same amount of manual work. The customer still waits for a real answer.
What a useful first reply contains
Before you automate anything, write down what a good first reply looks like when your best person sends it by hand. It usually has four parts.
A greeting with the name. Yelp gives you the first name. Use it.
A confirmation of what they asked for. Repeat the job back in a few words so they know a human read it, or at least that something read it properly.
One question, not five. The instinct is to send a questionnaire. Resist it. Ask the single question that unlocks a quote and save the rest for the next message.
A reason to reply. A price range from your rate card, an availability window, or a note that you can hold a slot. Something that makes answering worth their time.
Setting up a conversational auto responder
If you want the thread to keep moving without someone watching the inbox, the responder needs to hold a back and forth rather than fire once. That is the difference between an automated message and an automated conversation.
Whatever tool you use, the configuration work is the same and it is mostly about writing down what you already know:
Load your services and prices. List what you do and what it costs, including the ranges you are comfortable quoting in a message. Anything outside that list should be handed to a person rather than guessed at.
Write your qualification questions in priority order. Job type, address, urgency, access, photos, budget. The responder should ask them across several messages, not all at once.
Set your hours and coverage area. A responder that books someone forty miles outside your radius costs you more than a slow reply.
Decide your handoff rules. Most teams hand off when the job qualifies, when the customer asks for a person, when the request is outside the price list, or when the conversation turns into a complaint.
Decide your follow up cadence. A common pattern is one nudge after a few days, another the following week, and a final one after two weeks, then stop. Each nudge should reference the actual conversation instead of repeating the first message.
InstantResponse.AI does this on Yelp Requests specifically, and the same setup covers Google Local Services Ads and Thumbtack message leads. You can see how the rules and tone are configured on the AI customization page, and how the conversation logic works on the conversational AI page.
Test it before you trust it
Send yourself a request from a personal Yelp account and run three scenarios: a straightforward job, a job you do not offer, and a question about price. Read the replies as a customer would. If any of them sound like a form letter, fix the wording before you leave it running.
Then check the thread a week later. The follow ups are the part people forget to test, and they are the part that recovers leads other companies abandon.
What to watch after it is live
Track four things and ignore the rest for the first month:
- How many requests get a reply within a minute.
- How many customers reply to that first message.
- How many threads reach your team with the answers you asked for.
- How many were spam and never needed a person at all.
If reply rate is low, your first message is asking too much or offering too little. If threads reach your team half qualified, your question order is wrong. Both are copy problems, not software problems, and both are quick to fix.
The short version
Turn on Yelp's native auto reply today because a fast acknowledgement beats silence. Then decide whether you want the conversation to continue without you. If you are paying for Yelp leads and losing them overnight, the second step is where the money is.
If you want to see what that looks like on your own account, the Yelp Auto Responder page walks through the setup, and Speed to Lead for Local Service Businesses covers why the first useful reply matters more than the tenth follow up.
Same job, different channel: How to respond to Thumbtack leads faster and How to automate replies to Google LSA message leads cover the same setup on the other two paid channels.