How to customize Cintia step by step (so it responds how you would)

Cintia is an AI agent built on Gemini that learns about your business to suggest and respond to reviews just the way you would.

Unlike typical AI review-response tools, which return an answer to a prompt with certain instructions, Cintia is an assistant that understands, learns, and decides.

The best way to think about it is that Cintia is an employee, not a robot. It doesn’t run on rules — it needs training, learning, corrections, and examples. It needs you to explain “how we do things here.”

Let’s look at how to train your new employee.

What Cintia learns from

Cintia has 5 ways of learning what you expect from her:

  1. Your past replies — what you’ve already published on Google.
  2. Your custom instructions — what you tell her explicitly.
  3. Your corrections — when you edit her suggestion.
  4. Your templates — model replies you create as references.
  5. The documents you upload — your letter, your menu.

Cintia decides, for each review, what to prioritize when generating the reply. For example, if you’ve just started with Cinquo, she’ll only be able to learn from your past replies — so if you notice Cintia’s replies sound like “ChatGPT,” it’s probably because she’s imitating the tone you’d been using before.

If, for instance, you have a template for negative reviews that fits a specific complaint really well, Cintia is very likely to use that template — even adapt it — to prepare her reply.

Tip:

When Cintia suggests a reply, you’ll see her reasoning underneath, in English:



That line tells you what type of learning she used to produce the reply. It’s your tell for knowing where you need to reinforce the training if the reply isn’t what you expected.

With that in mind, here’s our recipe for getting Cintia to reply just as you would — to the point where you’ll struggle to remember whether you or Cintia answered that review.

Step 1. Start with the templates

This is the starting point, not an extra.

Create at least 2 or 3 templates for positive reviews and 2 or 3 for negative ones, with a strongly defined tone. They don’t need to be perfect, and you don’t need to apply them manually when replying: once they’re created, Cintia starts using them as a reference for new incoming reviews.

Two things worth knowing:

The more distinctive your templates’ tone, the better. In other words, if the template is “Thanks $NAME for your review!”, Cintia doesn’t have much to learn about your tone from that — but if the template is “Wow $NAME, we love that you took the time to share your experience with us. You’ve earned today’s Karma award,” what Cintia can learn about your tone is completely different.

Step 2. Write your custom instructions

This is where the personality really gets defined. General instructions apply to all reviews, regardless of rating.

What works:

Cintia already has all the context about your business. These are small fine-tunings that add up.

Step 3. Fine-tune by star rating

On top of the general instructions, you can write specific instructions for each rating: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 stars. These override the general ones.

This is where the improvement shows up fastest, because a 1-star review and a 5-star review shouldn’t be answered anywhere near the same way:

An important note about negative reviews: explicitly tell Cintia not to treat an accusation as fact if you notice she isn’t already doing that. If a customer says items were missing from their order, Cintia shouldn’t take it at face value or apologize blindly. The right approach is to treat it as something to verify: “Let’s look into what you’re describing about X.”

Step 4. Control which replies she learns from

This is the setting almost nobody uses, and it solves a very specific problem.

Cintia learns from your past replies. Great — unless those past replies were written by an agency that no longer works with you, or by you six months ago in a different tone. In that case, she’s copying a style you no longer want.

The fix is one line in your custom instructions:

Don’t use reviews before [date] as a reference, or something along those lines.

Set the date to when you changed tone, team, or manager — or today. From that point on, Cintia relies only on what you’ve done since then.

This is especially useful when you notice Cintia is “too enthusiastic” or keeps repeating phrases you no longer use: it’s almost always because she’s inheriting them from old replies, not from your instructions.

Step 5. Set the language

You can set the default reply language for when Cintia can’t detect one (mainly reviews with no comment).

If the review is in another language, the suggested or automatic reply will be in that language too.

Step 6. Upload your menu (if you’re a restaurant)

In settings you can attach documents to give Cintia context. The most obvious case in hospitality is the menu: with the menu uploaded, when someone mentions a dish by name, Cintia knows what they’re talking about instead of guessing.

Important: if your category isn’t Restaurant, this option isn’t available to you.

Step 7. Location-level instructions (and how priority works)

If you manage more than one location, you can configure Cintia at the account level (all locations) and at the location level (just one).

The logic works like classic inheritance, and it’s worth understanding well:

Put in real terms: if you have 50 locations and have customized just 1, changing something at the general level applies it to the other 49. The customized one stays as it was.

This is what you want 90% of the time, because a location with a named chef or a different menu needs different instructions. Which is why this matters: if you customize a location, you’ll have to update it by hand whenever you change the general settings.

The same applies to automatic replies: turning them on “for everyone” doesn’t activate them for locations that have their own settings.

Step 8. Different instructions for delegated users

If you have managers with delegated access and permission to reply, you can create instructions that differ from yours. A real example configuration:

This is useful so the team’s replies sound different from management’s when they’re the ones answering, or so a location can keep a more casual tone than the brand’s, for example.

Step 9. Turn on automatic suggestions

Up to this point you’ve been configuring. This step is the one that actually saves you time.

With automatic suggestions turned on, Cintia prepares the reply before you even open the review. Every new review that comes in already has a proposed reply waiting for you in the list: you open it, read it, publish it, or edit it.

Two things to note:

When a review is too sensitive for an automatic reply — serious accusations, staff-related issues, formal complaints — Cintia flags it as “Requires Human Intervention” and leaves it for you. She won’t make up a reply just to get it done, and you can quickly filter these to handle them as a priority.

Step 10. Correct her during the first few weeks

This is the part people skip.

Cintia needs training. During the first few weeks, correct the tone on every suggestion before publishing it. Every correction you publish becomes learning material. That’s how you teach her.

The classic mistake: publishing a reply you don’t really like because you’re in a hurry. Cintia assumes that’s the right kind of reply and goes on to produce more like it. If a suggestion doesn’t convince you, we recommend editing or regenerating it rather than publishing it as-is.

Sign that you’re on track: when the reasoning behind suggestions starts saying “based on custom instructions and past replies” instead of just “based on past replies.”

Step 11. Once it’s dialed in, automate

Once you’ve spent a few weeks and the suggestions come out publish-ready without edits, it’s time for the last step: Cinquo lets you turn on automatic replies based on Cintia’s suggestions.

You no longer review and publish — replies go out on their own, and you monitor. You can choose which ratings get automatic replies and schedule a time window and time zone so replies match the business’s opening hours.

Don’t turn this on day one. The order that works is: templates → instructions → a few weeks of manual training → automation.

👉 How to automate replies to your reviews with Cinquo

Summary: the order that works

  1. Create at least 2-3 positive templates and 2-3 negative ones with a distinctive tone.
  2. Write the general instructions: context, voice, list of off-limits phrases (only if you spot things to improve).
  3. Add instructions by rating/stars (start with the negative ones).
  4. Add “don’t use replies before [date] as a reference” if you’re carrying an old tone you don’t want influencing the learning.
  5. Set a default language.
  6. [Upload your letter or menu]
  7. Customize the locations that need it and have a different tone.
  8. Turn on automatic suggestions.
  9. Correct by hand for a few weeks.
  10. Automate and monitor.

A few minutes of setup and a few weeks of correcting. In exchange: every review answered daily, in your voice, without depending on whether you have a free afternoon.

Want us to take a look at your setup? Reach out and we’ll review it with you.