If you will be transitioning to PowerReviews from your current Ratings and Reviews provider -- welcome! Read on to learn more about the transition and implementation process and what you can expect.
This article contains the following sections:
Timing
Implementation times can vary widely depending on a number of factors, including but not limited to:
- The scope of your overall project in terms of products and features
- The availability of your development resources, and whether they are in-house or third-party
- How many websites you will be implementing
- Your targeted launch date with the PowerReviews solution
- When your current reviews provider solution will expire
These factors and other critical need-to-know items can be discussed during the pre-implementation phase with your PowerReviews Account Executive and Solutions Consultant. Be sure to let them know of any timeline or deadline you have, so that your eventual Implementation Team is aware of any time constraints.
We generally see that single-site implementations average 4-6 weeks, though the code implementation itself is more so a matter of dev hours or days. The additional project time is due to deliverables such as content import files, Product Data files, and/or Order Data files, as well as questions, troubleshooting, and pre- and post-launch QA.
To ensure you do not have any downtime on your website (ie., with no reviews displayed), we recommend that all PowerReviews code is implemented and tested in a staging or development environment so that when it's time for launch, your developers can simply swap your old reviews code for the PowerReviews code instead.
Teams
PowerReviews will provide a two-person Implementation Team during the integration period to ensure a smooth transition and launch. You will also have a dedicated two-person Account Team post-implementation to assist in day-to-day questions, strategy, training, best practices, renewals, or any other needs.
Implementation Team
- Implementation Project Manager (IPM): Your IPM will be the business-side point of contact during the implementation phase and will be largely responsible for monitoring project scope/changes, timeline, deliverables, status meetings, email communication, and ensuring a successful launch.
- Technical Implementation Consultant (TIC): Your TIC will be the technical-side point of contact during the implementation phase and will be largely responsible for answering any JavaScript or API related questions from your developers, validating/troubleshooting/importing all data feeds and legacy content, and running pre- and post-launch QA checks.
Your IPM and TIC each have unique responsibilities but work as a team, so any implementation project communication should go to both of them.
Account Team
- Account Manager (AM): Your AM will be the high-level point of contact post-implementation and will be largely responsible for business goals discussions, benchmarking, and renewals.
- Customer Success Manager (CSM): Your CSM will be the day-to-day point of contact post-implementation and will be largely responsible for training, questions, best practices and strategy discussions, and fielding any technical tickets you may have to the PowerReviews Technical Support team.
Your AM and CSM each have unique responsibilities but work as a team, so any post-implementation communication should go to both of them.
Project Phases
Your implementation project has several phases, with different members of your team potentially involved in each phase to ensure that data is transitioned over correctly from your current provider and that the PowerReviews integration itself is done correctly.
Planning
You and your team should prepare to compile and send PowerReviews the necessary data exports required for your project scope. These would include:
- Review Import File - required if you have legacy review content you wish to transfer over to PowerReviews
- Q&A Import File - required if you have legacy Q&A content you wish to transfer over to PowerReviews
- Migration File - required if your legacy review/Q&A content was collected on different product identifiers than what you will use to implement PowerReviews (this is common if you are transitioning to PowerReviews and migrating eCommerce platforms at the same time)
- Product Data Feed - recommended as a best practice so that we can prime our database with your full product catalog, assign review templates to the appropriate products, and get a jumpstart on Syndication efforts
- Order Data Feed - recommended that you review the documentation and compile a sample file to ensure you will be able to pass the required data points from your system to PowerReviews (this file is only needed if you will be using PowerReviews for your Follow-Up Emails and if you prefer to send your customer orders via this feed vs. the JavaScript Checkout Beacon)
Test Account Creation
Your TIC will create a Test account for your developers to use in their integration efforts. Your IPM will provide the associated account credentials which will consist of a Merchant Group ID, Merchant ID, API Key, and Locale. If you have multiple sites, you'll receive Test accounts and credentials sets for each.
Any reviews submitted to Test accounts will auto-publish after ~24 hours, in alignment with our API refresh cycle.
Development
This is typically the longest project phase, during which your developers will fully integrate the products and features in scope for your PowerReviews solution (such as the Review Display, Write-a-Review Form, and Checkout Beacon).
Your Implementation Team will provide all technical documentation they need specifically, based on your scope, but you may review all of our Technical Documentation here.
Though not required, you can also customize your PowerReviews content to fit your brand. To learn more about how you can use CSS to affect the look and feel of your integration, see Customizing Your PowerReviews Platform.
Your IPM will generally schedule a weekly implementation status meeting to discuss any development questions or blockers; we can also work with your teams via email if that is preferred.
Quality Assurance
Once your developers have completed their work, PowerReviews will ask for a link(s) to your dev or staging environment. Your TIC will then run through our pre-launch QA checks and will provide feedback should anything need to be fixed before launch.
Your team should also be running pre-launch QA during this time and alert PowerReviews to any questions or issues.
Launch
Once your TIC has completed pre-launch QA and has verified that your code is working properly, they will clone your Test account into a Production account and will copy over all pertinent account settings. You will then simply swap in your Test account credentials for the Production account credentials and will be greenlit for PowerReviews launch!
It's important to coordinate the launch timing with your Implementation Team to ensure that your IPM and TIC won't be out of office; if that's the case, backups will be assigned. We also will not be able to support weekend launches or launches outside of our normal working hours (9am-5pm Central Time). If launch occurs outside of our availability, we will proceed with our standard post-launch QA checks as soon as we are able to once normal working hours resume.
Similar to pre-launch QA, your TIC will run post-launch checks and will follow-up with any pertinent feedback. We can also import any delta files at this time (ie., if you received reviews between the time of your initial file send and your PowerReviews launch).
Project Completion
Once your final QA checks have cleared and any final items have been addressed, your IPM will schedule a call to introduce you to your ongoing Account Team. The implementation project will then be closed and you will be fully transitioned over to your AM and CSM.