Helps Restaurants Manage Online Reviews to Compete More Effectively and Drive Business
“When consumers are looking for a restaurant, they typically check reviews and will choose a place that has many reviews and lots of good ones,” explained SWIPEBY Founder and CEO Carl Turner. “This makes it difficult for an independent restaurant operator – especially for one that’s new to a neighborhood – to compete against mega chains that have huge, automated marketing and tech engines with big budgets. Now reviews are automatically managed through our platform.”
According to Turner, SWIPEBY’s new 5-Star Review Tool is focused on helping to attract new business to establishments, build relationships and loyalty with their guests and drive important repeat business.
The new 5-Star Review Tool does all three with all online orders. It automatically serves up a push notification that makes it fun for a guest to rate their experience on a five-point scale. If the review is a five, the SWIPEBY platform asks the patron to share it along with comments on Google and on the patron’s social media platforms. If the review is less than a five, SWIPEBY asks for feedback and instantly shares that feedback with the restaurant.
“The five star reviews will quickly build a formidable reputation for the restaurant in their market, which will entice new customers to give it a try,” Turner said. “It drives both dine-in and off-premises business to the establishment.”
He explained that SWIPEBY’s platform’s ability to instantly share less than stellar reviews with the restaurant enables them to immediately address and resolve issues which helps build relationships and create return business; analyze the data to see if there is a process that can be tweaked or a menu item that needs to be adjusted; or if they are multi-unit, they will know if a particular location has issues or if one is excellent and can help improve others.
According to BrightLocal’s 2022 Local Consumer Review Survey, 49 percent of consumer respondents trust consumer reviews as much as personal recommendations from family and friends. Some 89 percent of consumers say they would be ‘fairly’ or ‘highly’ likely to use a business that responds to all reviews, positive and negative. The annual study focuses on consumer usage and attitudes toward online reviews.
“It is pretty clear that online reviews matter to restaurants,” Turner said. “That’s why we added this feature to our platform. We want to give the independent restaurant owner the same ability to leverage reviews to increase business as larger chains. It is important we help level the playing field when it comes to customer reviews management.”
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