Even More Evidence Of The Importance Of Restaurant Reviews

Here on the simpleERB blog, we never stop stressing the importance of restaurant reviews to your business. We have discussed how negative restaurant reviews can help your business, how negative reviews can hurt your restaurant’s valuation, how to get a good review of your restaurant published on Yelp, and the benefits of publishing negative reviews of your own restaurant. The reason we dedicate so much space on this blog to reviews is because they are integral to your bottom line – as all the evidence in the articles above prove.

Responding to restaurant reviews

And now we have two other pieces of evidence to share. An article from Street Fight this week highlights two academic studies which provide fascination insights into the power of online reviews. The first is from Davide Proserpio of USC and Giorgos Zervas of Boston University in 2016 and is titled “Online Reputation Management: Estimating the Impact of Management Responses on Consumer Reviews.”
The study analysed tens of thousands of TripAdvisor reviews and found that when hotels respond to consumer reviews, on average their review volume increases by 12% and their star rating goes up by 0.12 stars. This might not seem like a lot, but TripAdvisor’s average ratings are rounded to the nearest half star, so if your mathematical average goes from just 4.14 to 4.26, consumers will see a 4.5 rating where a business used to have a 4.
In a summary of the study published earlier this year in Harvard Business Review, the authors offer the following conclusion: “While negative reviews are unavoidable, our work shows that managers can actively participate in shaping their firms’ online reputations. By monitoring and responding to reviews, a manager can make sure that when negative reviews come in—as they inevitably will—they can respond constructively and maybe even raise their firm’s rating along the way.”

Text analysis of restaurant reviews

The second study is by professors Xun Xu, Xuequn Wang, Yibai Lee, and Mohammad Haghighi. It is entitled “Business intelligence in online customer textual reviews: Understanding consumer perceptions and influential factors,” and appeared in the International Journal of Information Management in 2017. The study analysed thousands of hotel reviews on booking.com and instead of looking at ratings, studied the textual content of the reviews, including language and sentiment. The study found the following:
“Online textual reviews can provide a way for businesses to understand customer needs and improve their products and services. Compared with customer ratings, online textual reviews can show more details about customers’ consumption experiences and customer perceptions because of their open structure. Thus, managers can obtain more insights regarding customers’ expectations and needs and their perceived quality of product and services.”

How simpleERB can help

So how to do these findings relate to simpleERB? Well, simpleERB allows you to add a link to the customer confirmation email which allows the customer to submit feedback to you after their meal.
When you get a good review you can tick a box on the email copy which sends them a request to share their review, along with links to your restaurant Facebook and Trip Advisor profiles.
You can then keep an eye on your profiles on these sites to wait for the relevant reviews and respond to them accordingly.
The feature also allows you to deal with negative reviews in house, before they are splashed over the review websites.
Having direct, timely feedback from customers who have just dined at your newsletter is a goldmine of insights you can use to improve your restaurant’s experience.