MackCollier.com

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Restaurant Reputation Management: The Data-Driven Playbook for Turning All Reviews Into Raving Fans

restaurant reputation management

If you are a CMO in the restaurant industry, few things keep you up at night like your online reputation. A handful of negative reviews can counter hundreds of positive interactions in the digital age. But effectively encouraging, monitoring, responding to, and leveraging guest feedback online is complex. With fierce competition, restaurant reputation management becomes vitally important.

That’s why taking a proactive, strategic approach to managing reviews and amplifying authentic earned advocacy is now mission-critical. This playbook explores proven ways restaurant marketers can use data, processes, and creativity to turn any review into five stars.

Strategically Solicit First-Party Reviews

Don’t leave review generation to chance. Proactively collect feedback from delighted guests through:

  • Review links on receipts and emails surveys to lower barriers. Make it quick and easy for customers to leave reviews. Also, track your restaurant’s reviews online and point customers toward the sites that would help the most with your restaurant reputation management efforts.
  • Thank you follow-ups checking on the experience, offering review links. These can be done via a newsletter than also offers coupons on future purchases.
  • Occasionally offering a free dessert in exchange for a review. I am subscribed to Olive Garden’s newsletter, and they will occasionally offer a free dessert in exchange for my feedback.
  • Manager outreach to VIPs asking for reviews based on their satisfaction. VIPs can be identified by membership in your loyalty program, or by managers and staff simply identifying a frequent customer. Frequency of business obviously signals satisfaction with service and product, so your restaurant should encourage reviews from frequent guests.

Empower your happy customers to sing your praises via stellar reviews.

Leverage Servers to Solicit Reviews and Feedback

Your servers are in direct contact with your restaurant’s customers, and as such they have the best sense of how their meal is going. Servers need to remember to:

  • Praise in public, criticize in private. If a customer is pleased with their meal and experience in your restaurant, the server should encourage them to leave a review, and steer them toward the sites where a positive review would be the most beneficial to your restaurant.
  • If a customer is unsatisfied with their meal and experience, the server should encourage the customer to leave feedback or to even talk with a manager. This gives the restaurant an opportunity to address the customer’s problem, without it going public. Obviously, the customer could still leave a review online or tell others, but if they are unsatisfied, you want to know why so you can address their concerns.
  • Train wait staff to recognize if a customer is satisfied or unsatisfied with their meal and experience. Your staff will pick up on cues from the customer naturally throughout the course of the meal as to whether they are satisfied or unsatisfied with their experience. At the end of the meal, if the server believes the customer has been satisfied with their meal, ask them to leave a review and encourage them to review on the site that best helps your restaurant. If they appear to be unsatisfied, then ask them to leave feedback on their experience. If the customer does leave feedback, but it is positive, you can contact the customer directly and thank them for their feedback, then ask for a review at that time.
  • Have managers observe customers and check in with them. When doing so, the manager can also pick up on cues from the customer as to whether they are satisfied or not with their meal, and address appropriately.

Praise in public, criticize in private. Empower your servers to help create positive word of mouth for your restaurant.

Activate Brand Advocates

Happy, frequent customers are your best source for positive reviews and the frontline in your restaurant reputation management efforts. Empower them by:

  • Offering incentives like loyalty perks for shares and reviews. Tie this into your existing loyalty program. Remember, happy customers WANT to sing your praises, you are just giving them the tools to do so.
  • Making it effortless to post through review widgets and social media links. Offer to collect reviews on your site, and ask for permission to repost on your social channels. Communicate how this can help your restaurant, and true fans will jump at the chance.
  • Have staff help in identifying frequent customers. So a few years ago, I got on a serious kick for Pizza Hut breadsticks. Every time I was running errands in town, I would stop by my local Pizza Hut and grab some breadsticks. The staff quickly recognized me, what my order would be, and how I liked them made. They would then ask me while I was waiting if I would please fill our a survey for them, and then inform me that I could win a $10 credit toward a future order. I would do the survey while waiting for my order, then when my order was ready, the staff would let me know it was prepared the way I wanted it, and I would let them know I had filled out the survey. The staff was smart enough to recognize that I was a happy customer, so they encouraged me to offer reviews.
  • Spotlighting top advocates as “VIPs” on your digital customer wall of fame. Treat your happy customers like they are rock stars, because they are. Put the spotlight on them, it encourages them to give you more reviews and feedback, which is exactly what you want.

Proactively activating your biggest fans maximizes their impact. Oh, and read the best book on the topic, Think Like a Rock Star: How to Create Social Media and Marketing Strategies That Turn Customers Into Fans.

Monitor Third-Party Review Sites

Actively track guest feedback using tools like Hootsuite (Perch is another option) to:

  • Get alerts when new reviews are left. When a new review happens, it’s vital that you know about it ASAP. For instance, let’s say your server followed the above advice and encouraged a happy customer to leave a review. The customer did as soon as they got home. If you have their contact information, you can contact them personally and thank them for the review. This encourages them to not only return to your restaurant, but to spread more positive word of mouth about you both online and offline.
  • Identify recurring themes and systemic weaknesses. Actively tracking reviews and customer feedback helps you identify themes versus isolated experiences. Whether it’s a positive review or a negative one, you need to understand what triggered the review. If there’s a problem with service, that needs to be addressed. Likewise, if customers are happy, you need to understand why so you can replicate that experience for other customers.
  • Keep pulse on your average ratings compared to competitors. If possible, set up monitoring alerts for select competitors. Just as you want to identify recurring themes in your own restaurant, you can do the same for competitors. Perhaps another local restaurant has added a feature that customers are raving about. Could your restaurant offer something similar? Once you know what their customers are excited about, then you can evaluate if a similar feature could work for your location.

Proactively monitoring online reviews empowers you to act quickly and appropriately.

Respond Skillfully to Negative Reviews

Negative feedback is inevitable in hospitality. Yet if handled correctly, a customer’s negative experience can be defused, or possibly even converted into a positive. Here’s some tactics to employ:

  • Reply promptly, calmly and avoid defensiveness. Make sure that the member of your CS team that responds does NOT take the criticize personally, because it isn’t.
  • Do NOT admit fault UNTIL it has been clearly established that the customer’s negative review is a direct result of unsatisfactory service from your restaurant.  You SHOULD communicate to the customer that you are sorry they are unsatisfied with the service they received, as this communicates empathy for their concerns. But wait on apologizing for an error until you have established that an actual error was made.
  • Offer to move your exchange with the customers OFF THE REVIEW SITE or social channel. Give them a way to contact you or your staff directly. Emphasize that you value their privacy and the privacy of your staff, and can better address and server them in private.
  • If you find that the customer has a legitimate complaint, clearly communicate to them that their feedback will be addressed and let them know how. This communicates that you are taking their feedback seriously.
  • Share improvements made to address broader issues raised. Followup with the customer to let them know what you found and how you are addressing their feedback. This will also communicate to the customer that you value their feedback.
  • For false claims, politely correct with facts. Do NOT argue with the customer, especially if the exchange is happening online, in public.
  • Consider inviting unhappy reviewers back to improve perceptions. This is another way to illustrate how feedback is taken seriously and improvements made.

I’ve worked with clients for over 15 years in helping them deal with angry customers, and I can tell you this from my own experience: Angry customers can often be converted into your most passionate fans IF you handle their complaints correctly. Follow the above steps and you will be on your way.

Continuously Improve Based on Insights

Regularly analyze customer reviews and complaints to:

  • Identify recurring complaints and focus training to strengthen weaknesses. Frequent sources of complaints should be flagged by your customer service team and sent to management so it can be addressed at the frontlines in your restaurant by staff and management.
  • Identify what’s working. If there are features of your dining experience that are consistently praised by customers, highlight those features to make customers aware of them. This can encourage more positive reviews.
  • Set targets for ratings improvements by location and category. Set realistic goals and give management a plan of action to reach those goals. Make sure everyone on staff understands what the goals are, why it’s important to reach them, and how to get there.
  • Conduct text analysis of online reviews to detect shifts in sentiment and perceptions. Identify gains and losses and drill down to figure out what triggered the change.

Insights inform operational investments that can help your restaurant reputation management efforts exceed expectations.

Today’s diners heavily factor reviews into dining decisions. With strategy, creativity and commitment, restaurant brands can leverage guest feedback to perpetually improve and manage reputation. Are you ready to turn reviews into five-star raves? The impact on guest acquisition, loyalty and sales makes this effort well worth the investment.

restaurant reputation management

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Igniting Organic Advocacy: The Tech Brand Growth Accelerator

online reviews technology industryYour best salesforce is your happy customers. I’ve build a business on this reality, I wrote a best-selling book on the process. No one does a better job of marketing your technology brand and driving revenue that leads to real bottom-line growth than you most passionate customers.

This article explores six proven strategies technology leaders can leverage to encourage online reviews, referrals, and vibrant community engagement across the user lifecycle.

Conduct Comprehensive Sentiment Research

A granular understanding of current user perceptions, frustrations and delights is crucial. Approaches may involve:

  • Journey mapping key touchpoints and interactions to reveal pain points and moments of value. This should apply to standard customer journey mapping to track the purchase process, but also include loyalty mapping. You need to identify potential pain points and bottlenecks in both journeys, at the same time.
  • Conduct surveys and interviews to gather direct feedback from users. Surveys are vital, given that feedback collected is accurately assessed and improvements applied as a result. Surveys of customers as well as members of your loyalty or brand ambassador programs should be done as these are different customers and both groups can provide valuable feedback.
  • Social listening across forums and platforms to analyze patterns in sentiment. Don’t focus simply on social media channels. Today’s technology consumer is frequenting message boards and forums to do product research. Make sure you monitor all online chatter around and about your brand, regardless of where it happens.
  • Review analysis to uncover systemic issues affecting satisfaction as well as product strengths to highlight. Look for trends across all feedback collected, regardless of the source. Examining all feedback will reveal consistent positive and negative traits and brand associations. These can be addressed in the case of problems, and amplified if they are positive.

Armed with rich insights, you can develop targeted advocacy initiatives addressing user needs and amplifying customer advocacy.

Incentivize Authentic Reviews

Reviews directly from users provide credible organic advocacy that fuels growth. But review generation requires motive. Consider:

  • Follow up on support tickets or onboarding by asking for a review and direct link for ease. Make a special attempt to solicit reviews from any user that communicates a positive experience or association with your tech brand.
  • Offer perks like free months of service for leaving detailed positive reviews. However, these can also be used as a reward for an existing online review. For instance, if you identify a blog post that promotes your brand or product, reach out to the blogger and say thank you, and offer them a perk such as a discount or swag as a reward. Remember that rewarding existing behavior is more powerful in creating advocacy than incentivizing new behavior.
  • Develop reviewer leaderboards and recognition for top advocates. One of the keys I always stress to clients is ‘reward the behavior that you want to encourage’. If you want more online reviews for your technology brand, then look for ways to reward customers for engaging in that behavior. Leaderboards are a great way to spotlight your best advocates, and it makes them feel like the rock stars that they are.
  • Highlight customer feedback on your site, and also highlight how that feedback was implemented at your company. This is incredibly powerful as it communicates to customers that you take their feedback seriously, and you act on it. This encourages customers to leave MORE feedback once they see that you take their feedback seriously enough to act on it.

It’s a marketing reality: We trust our fellow customers more than we trust brands. Do all you can to encourage your happy customers to sing your praises, and spotlight them when they do.

Launch a Referral/Affiliate Program

Referrals are a great way to attract new customers and reward your current advocates for behavior they are already engaging in. Formalize advocacy through:

  • Create referral landing pages that highlight the value proposition and call to action. This helps increase referral conversions, which helps both your brand and your customers who are driving referrals.
  • Tiered rewards for referrers based on conversion rates, from discounts to premium services. These can also be integrated with your customer loyalty program to amplify the perks that members receive from participating.
  • Promotion of the program through email, in-product, social media, and community channels. If your tech brand has a community forum, highlight your referral program there, as forum participants are a great pool to draw from for your referral program.
  • Streamlined sharing tools such as custom referral links and social share buttons. Give your customers the tools they need to more easily drive referrals, and track their progress doing so.
  • Leader boards spotlighting top member advocates and referrers. Reward the behavior you want to encourage. Spotlighting top referrers encourages them to increase referrals and the recognition they receive prompts others to engage in the same behavior.

Leverage affiliates to expand reach beyond your owned channels.

Encourage User-Generated Content

User content like tutorials, use cases, and product demonstrations serve as compelling proof of value. Encourage UGC by:

  • Identifying key customer success stories to request content development support around. Work with your customer support team to identify tickets that could serve as the basis for a positive case study.
  • Making it simple for users to contribute content through built-in creation and submission tools. Have your content marketing team work with users to take their submissions and craft compelling stories that highlight the user and their positive experience with your tech brand.
  • Promoting contributed content across your social channels when approved. Make sure that your promotion content is spoken in the voice of your customer as often as possible.
  • Spotlighting user content creators through badges, rewards, and campaigns. It’s a broken record, but reward the behavior you want to encourage.

UGC reaches buyers with authentic peer perspectives that resonates with customers in a world where we trust ourselves more than we do brands.

Build Vibrant User Community Interaction

One of the best ways to accelerate customer advocacy is to create ways for your happy customers to engage directly with each other. Ways to foster community include:

  • Hosting active user forums for knowledge sharing and feature discussions. User forums and message boards are vital to success for tech companies, they serve as a way for user to do product research, to self-diagnose problems, and simply connect with others who share a common interest.
  • Facilitating user groups organized by interest, experience level, geography or use cases. As you begin to build an online community, you can further segment that group to better connect users with their peers. An additional perk of this approach is that more experienced users can become candidates for moderator duties in your community. This can make the task of community management easier for your brand, but it also makes the community more likely to participate if ‘one of their own’ is involved in overseeing the direction of the forum.
  • Supporting meetups, events, and virtual community hangouts enabling users to connect. In-person meetups among your happy customers are wonderful ways to build advocacy. For example, here’s a recap of a customer meetup event I helped coordinate for Dell.
  • Engaging power users with early access privileges or advisory council roles. This is another perk that can be tied into your loyalty program. Early access is a great way to provide a low-cost perk to customers that drives appreciation, engagement and positive reviews, all at a low cost.

Relationships between users amplifies loyalty, retention, and advocacy for your brand.

Track and Optimize Initiatives

A data-driven approach ensures advocacy efforts deliver measurable impact. Key metrics span:

  • Review volume, ratings, product sentiment and category benchmarking. Determine what are the common traits associated with reviews, such as sites used, content of the reviews, what prompted a review, etc. By analyzing reviews you can determine trends and how to encourage more positive online reviews.
  • Referral traffic and account creation driven by links. Custom links should be given to all referral participants so the number of referrals they create can easily be tracked by them, and your brand. Each participant in your referral program should have their own unique link.
  • UGC contribution growth and user engagement rates. Track your most frequent contributors and reward their behavior to encourage more submissions. Collect feedback on what UGC is driving engagement, and share that feedback with contributors so they can improve their own UGC efforts.
  • Renewal, retention, and frequency metrics within advocate groups. Identify potential bottlenecks to review and content creation. Study your most successful contributors, and find ways to distill their success down into easily shared bits that can help other contributors improve their own efforts.

Continual optimization and injection of creativity sustains momentum over time.

Turn Customers into Confident Advocates

With user trust in brands declining, transparently earned advocacy provides a competitive edge. By championing customers first, technology leaders can build communities and spur authentic referrals that fuel sustainable growth. Remember, technology users trust fellow users more than your brand when it comes to product communications. Accept this fact and lean into UGC and online reviews from your users.

What’s your biggest obstacle to unlocking advocates? Identifying friction points? Incentivizing reviews? Enabling UGC contribution? Prioritize progress on one front then build from there.

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Research: 54% of Online Shoppers Read Customer Reviews Before Every Purchase

A new research study by Digital.com found some interesting insights into how buyers are leveraging customer reviews to drive purchases. One of the key findings was that 54% of online shoppers read customer reviews before making any purchase.

That’s significant, and it again proves that customers trust other customers more than they trust brands.

Where Do Customer Reviews Fit Into the Buyer’s Journey?

Let’s revisit the Buyer’s Journey for a moment:

Buyer's Journey

The Interested stage is where the customer does their research into the product or service that they are interested in purchasing. Typically, the average online shopper will use two sources for their research:

1 – Customer reviews

2 – Product information on the company website

The typical online shopper will usually go back and forth between these two sources.  Once they are interested in a product, they will begin to look for content on the website that is product-specific. Then they will consult customer reviews to see what other customers thought about the product. Maybe they will find some customers complained about a certain product feature failing, or others might praise a certain feature.  The online shopper will then go back and review product information to see if the product has those features.

The point is, the typical online shopper wants and seeks input from other customers before committing to a purchase. So think about how you can either incorporate customer reviews into your website alongside product information, or think of ways to engage your customers to give them the tools they need to sell on your brand’s behalf. A good brand ambassador program, for instance, gives your brand a way to empower your customers to sell to other customers.

Let’s look at some of the other key findings from Digital.com’s research:

88% of Online Shoppers Read at Least Three Customer Reviews Before Making a Purchase

Notice that two thirds, 67% of respondents, read 4+ customer reviews before committing to a purchase!

Other findings:

  • Good reviews play the biggest role in online purchasing decisions
  • 100+ reviews make a business trustworthy, say 39% of online shoppers
  • 88% of online shoppers read at least 3 reviews before purchase

And I love this quote from Digital Marketing Executive, Huy Nguyen: “Review sentiment is important because consumers trust experiences of real users shared through images, video, and detailed explanations over what a brand might promote on their own.”

You can review all the findings from the research here.