FeedCheck customer reviews

How to Manage Google and Trip Advisor Reviews | 10 big troubles Shop Chains Have and How to Solve them

Using improvised or the wrong systems to keep track of your business reviews on the most trusted review websites – Google and Trip Advisor – may be easy for your shop’s team but, it’s getting troublesome for the rest of the management:

  • area supervising managers,
  • quality managers,
  • heads of commercial operations,
  • and founders.

The more you expand your business chain and open new locations, the more time-consuming and inaccurate your review data is. And so will be your business decisions.

From our customers’ experience – restaurants, bakeries, cafes, hotels, and any location-based business – we have compiled a list of 10 trouble-making sources they were dealing with before reaching out to us and how we solved them.

1. Reviews and ratings in one place | centralized data accessibility

If you run tens of locations across a region, country, and even abroad, then keeping up with your customers’ reviews after they paid you a visit and experienced your service and offerings may be overwhelming.

We all know Excel is the first tool to go to when a data management problem arises. And so, Excel has helped many of our customers until they felt overwhelmed by:

  • Manually updating Excel – nowadays, a nightmare for any human being
  • Delayed and inaccurate updates that made teams waste time with unnecessary concerns and questions
  • Asking someone for information, or creating a particular type of report
  • Excel troubleshooting – yes, we all know the feeling when Excel does not work
  • Persisting feeling of not getting it right or “should we even bother understanding our customer reviews anymore?”

After searching the Internet and founding FeedCheck, their problems faded away:

  • Getting all reviews in one place every day without having their team to work for that was a huge relief
  • Nobody was asking anybody anything: the data was clean and real-time shared, no questions at all
  • Everyone could get what they wanted with a click
  • No more troubleshootings but a 24h/7 responsive app

Now, everybody loves reading customer reviews again!

With a centralized review management SaaS for multi-location businesses, your team’s life can change while you trust your customer review data again.

2. Report on review metrics by your financial year calendar

Not everyone looks at its data from January 1st to December 31st.

Each business has its financial reporting calendar and, the customer reviews reporting needs should follow that too.

Custom filters are the solution.

Having all reviews in one place and applying custom combined filters by location & time interval, you can get your accurate numbers with a few clicks.

3. Report on review metrics by your organizational structure

While each location’s team found it easy to view its data, the management team members had to wait for the end of the month to get some numbers, and those were unreliable.

Their transition to FeedCheck allowed them to read their review metrics from different angles:

  • at location level
  • at area level, to spot performing shops versus those left behind by customer reviews
  • global view of the business

With this view available, they could pick up on problems top-down and make decisions for the whole business instead of a single location.

4. Review notifications

New reviews appear daily but, how do you know? And who should know about them?

The hospitality industry, especially restaurants and cafes, gets reviews pretty fast after customers experienced the place, service, and food. Staying informed on what customers say in one location allows you to take quick, proactive actions not only for that location but for the entire business.

While Google and Trip Advisor may have their independent ways to inform you on your new reviews, standardizing the notification system across different website reviews and for all your teams simplify the process.

Standardized review notifications across all review websites.


Thus:

  • Your staff from one location can stay notified on new reviews only for their location 
  • Area managers can stay informed on all location reviews in their area
  • Quality managers can get alerts on negative reviews concerning selected foods and dishes
  • Founders can receive weekly email summaries of new reviews to make sure they don’t lose contact with their customers’ voice.

These are only a few examples of how a standardized notification system can help you pace up with customer reviews everywhere.

5. Respond to reviews

The hospitality industry has the highest percentage of customers that will leave a review after their first experience with a restaurant, pastry shop, cafe, or hotel. That makes business owners and managers wanting not to neglect their customer feedback received on Google, Trip Advisor, and other review websites dedicated to the industry. 

That is the case for our customers too. And, from all the industry sectors that we support with their review management, hospitality is where the staff is the most speedy to solving a negative review.

45% of people dining out will leave a negative review if they had a poor dining experience. Make sure they know you heard them!

With the right review notification and review response system in place, your staff can do that too:

  • prioritize negative reviews,
  • run an in-store investigation to understand what has happened: who the client was, what did they order, why he might have been disappointed,
  • respond to their review and disappointment.

6. Check review trends

If the above troubles were bearable from one day to another despite the legacy way of doing things, getting an understanding of your review and rating trends every single time you need is not.

Review volume, ratings, topics reviewed, customer sentiment, Net Promoter Score, combined metrics. All trends in one place.

You need to:

  • check the trends your aggregated customer reviews are on,
  • see when you are going below your acceptable score rating
  • and why.

Besides the average score ratings, the Net Promoter Score based on online reviews is another way of assessing your customer satisfaction level.
Our customers’ area managers love that they can track this metric with precision and see how they stand against their industry level.

7. What customers are talking about?

Review volume and ratings are essential metrics, but do you know what they hide?

Customer reviews touch many aspects of a business but the delicate ones belong to the hospitality industry:

Serviceability:

This is a broader topic that includes your staff’s general attitude but may also point out particular staff members’ and the speed of service.

As they stop by to enjoy and indulge, your customers live their present moments more intensely.

They notice quickly and are sensitive to everything around them from the way they are welcomed, helped to accommodate their group’s size and diverse group’s members – adults, children, and pet companions.

The serving time is also critical for many of them – the more they wait, the more they think, and impatience installs on their minds.

Understand your customers’ experience to control your location and overall business rating score.

Location utilities and amenities:

Wifi connection is a topic that many customers review, and nowadays, it has also become a source of dispute between customers and a venue’s staff.

Location heating, cleaning conditions, dirt signs – customers scrutinize them all, then let their experience dictate your location rating.

Menu products:

A variety of foods and beverages to choose from besides the house’s specialty is reviewed, from how it is served to how fresh it is, what it tastes like, whether it caused digestive discomfort, and if people will order it again.

Getting these types of insights from Excel sheets is excruciating. Therefore, none of our customers had even tried that approach!

But they were amazed to find these insights in FeedCheck:

  • How many customers reviewed different types of foods and beverages
  • Customer sentiment trend for each dish type
  • Distribution of reviews by rating

and all were:

  • Ready-made
  • Continuously updated based on their new reviews
  • Accessible by anyone from the shop or management teams
  • Accessible by other chain’s shop teams to compare and get an understanding of their performances within the chain.

8. New products performance

Introducing new products to the menu takes time, recipe trials, tasting, and promotion. It needs to be perfect from the start.

Adding it to your menu and not measuring customers’ reviews puts everyone in the team into a black hole.

How do you know if customers liked it and how they liked it?
Reviews help.

Monitoring your customer reviews from the first day the new dish is in the see-through fridge validates your new menu and helps you plan for the next innovative flavor.

9. How shops rank?

Unless you can afford to pay for a full-time job to operate a complex Excel file of all review data, you can get access to ready-made automated review reports that speak to you. 

Knowing how your shops rank and evolve in your customer reviews at any given time keeps you connected to reality. 

Depending on your initial business intent, you can monitor your reviews and ratings, then either adjust or communicate your intention assertively. As long as you act in the right direction, the business scores will soon change. 

Going back to the above example of customers complaining about no wifi at the location, we may discover some businesses have good reasons for designing their customer experience that way:

  • Restaurants or cafes may be located in mesmerizing, breathtaking places and want to help people immerse into local beauty. 
  • Or they want to keep a quiet atmosphere for their clientele. 

In such cases, businesses should communicate more frequently about this particularity customers will experience when stepping onto their door and, this way, set expectations right.

10. Measure your position against competitors. Can Google My Business help?

That is a big one!

If Google My Business can help with your business reviews, competitor reviews are not accessible that way.

Google My Business cannot help you monitor competitor reviews! FeedCheck does.

For your competitor reviews and comparative analysis, our customers needed FeedCheck.

One preliminary step to monitoring your competitor reviews is deciding how you define and select your competitors. For restaurants and cafes, customers always look at reviews of places in the surrounding area. You can do that too!

Here’s one way of selecting your competitors:

  • Look at your street map and check restaurants, cafes or hotels across the street or on the next corner 
  • Repeat this exercise for all your locations
  • Group those locations by types of competitors: some may be independent businesses, others may be part of renowned chains, and so on.

With this clear input prepared, FeedCheck can now help you aggregate your competitor reviews, analyze and monitor them over time to see how your locations and areas perform against your competitors by all relevant customer review metrics. 

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Are you and your team tired of managing customer reviews the old way?

Check how we do it!

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