Which two numbers on a Yelp business page decide who gets the enquiry, and can an AI agent move them without sounding like a bot? Response Quality and Responsiveness. Yes, if you control the clock.

Every Yelp business page shows a Response Quality rating and a Responsiveness pair: reply time and reply rate. Consumers see them before they message. A Bay Area audiovisual event company we work with sat at "Room to improve", 2 hours, 100% (the real widget, left of the image). Replying to everyone was not the problem. Replying fast, and well, was.

What the agent does, on Zapier and Claude:

1. Reads every new Yelp enquiry as it lands, up to twenty a day for this client.

2. Drafts a reply in the business's own voice from a playbook: the services, the areas served, what a quote needs, what the owner never promises.

3. Scores the draft before it sends. Tone and scope, the enquiry's own details echoed back, one question that moves it toward a quote. That is the check aimed at Response Quality.

4. Sends inside 2 minutes by default. Or, if the owner prefers replies that read as a person at a desk, a custom human-like delay: a window such as 4 to 9 minutes, randomised per thread.

5. Follows up after 12 hours if the consumer went quiet.

6. Hands the thread to the owner on one click, and stays out of it from then on.

The right-hand panel in the image is the target state the agent is built to (labelled as such, not a client screenshot). The after numbers go in the case study when the widget shows them; I do not publish results before they exist.

Full case study on my profile. This shape ports to Google Business Profile messages, website chat and WhatsApp with the same playbook and the same clock.

Prem Patel, Nex Automations. Make.com Level 5 certified, official Make partner, Zapier Certified Expert.