Reviews Platforms
Reviews may often make or break your restaurant business. You will inevitably get some negative reviews that are not fair. Since you and all of your staff are human, no matter how careful you are, you will end up getting some less than favorable reviews that you do deserve as well.
Keep reading to learn how to manage your restaurant's reviews to your best advantage.
Popular Reviews Platforms for Restaurants
The most popular reviews platforms used by restaurants are:
- Yelp
- Google My Business
- Zomato (previously Urban Spoon)
- Open Table
- Zagat
- Gayot
- Menu Pages
Restaurant Reviews Management Best Practices
Your restaurant's participation in the reviews process is unfortunately not at your discretion. Sometimes the reviews platforms populate their databases with restaurant listings acquired from various data aggregators and all typically accept submissions from users as well as restaurant owners or managers.
Always Respond to Every Review on Every Platform
Be sure and "claim" the listing for your restaurant with each platform where you are collecting reviews. Until you do this, you cannot respond to reviews.
Regardless of whether the review is poor, mediocre or great, be sure to respond to it whenever you can.
Showing engagement shows that you care. Doing so will also lessen the impact of occasional poor reviews.
If someone has a bad experience, courteously and honestly respond and where appropriate, try to make an offer to them to come back again.
Be Proactive about Asking your Patrons for Feedback
Use appropriate signs at your restaurant to remind your guests to provide feedback about their dining experience. Train your staff to ask them to please provide feedback as well.
You may want to leave them a thank you card with your restaurant's URL printed on it along with a QR Code to make it simple for them to access your reviews page. (Your QR Code can be programmed to go to a specific URL).
Controlling the Reviews Process as a Restaurant
The great news is that you can control this process by using our two-step feedback and reviews program. It is completely integrated into our website CMS (content management system).
The Best Way Websites CMS connects to Locals.Reviews, which puts an easy to use and powerful Feedback and Reviews program that utilizes the popular NPS (Net Promoter Score).
Reviews Start on your Own Website
In the first step, your clients provide feedback via our plugin on your own website. From there, you have pre-configured the balance of their experience depending upon the score (0 - 10) they provide for you.
You control the flow of reviews based upon how they rate their experience with you. Their score will identify them as a:
- Promoter (9-10)
- Passive (7-8)
- Detractor (1-6)
and the next step they are presented depends upon the settings you provide.
This gives you control.
Fortunately, there is one place where you are in full control of the feedback and reviews process: on your own website!
- If they give you a 9-10 (4.5 or 5.0 stars), then they are presented with the options that you provide. They are thanked for their valuable feedback and asked to choose a reviews platform to also leave a review.
- Feedback that they provide on your site does NOT automatically post. You will receive and email and/or text alert and then login and check the feedback if you want it to show as a review on your site.
- You may respond to their feedback by email, phone or posting it on your site.
Manually Add Reviews from Any Reviews Platform
In addition to the automated function of Locals.Reviews, you may also easily manually add reviews from any other reviews platform.
You can't have too many reviews!
Review Counts Embedded into Your Site's Schema Markup
Since the Locals.Reviews program is a recognized, authoritative 3rd party reviews platform, results that print on your website will show in search engine results pages.
The Locals.Reviews program automatically keeps your reviews counts updated.
