Using Customer Ratings to Improve Your Restaurant Business

Positive customer ratings and reviews can be one of the most valuable and powerful customer acquisition and marketing tools for your restaurant business. If you’re ignoring your ratings and reviews, take a look at our post, Why Every Restaurant Should Care About Customer Ratings, to discover the potential revenue you’re most likely leaving on the table.

We also learned that receiving more customer reviews on a consistent basis can not only help you increase foot traffic and revenue, but consumers will have more assurance and trust that they will have a pleasurable experience at your establishment.

Here are a few ways in which you can get more ratings and reviews from your restaurant visitors.

Put Your Reviews Where Customers Can Easily Find Them

If you want your customers to leave you ratings and reviews, they need to know where to do it. One of the best solutions is to utilize your guest WiFi landing page. When customers log into your WiFi, you can ask for a review there, or provide links to your review pages on the popular review sites.

Other ideas might include adding signage on your tables or at your POS, or adding a review form directly on your website.

If you have an automated WiFi marketing platform, you can set up an automatically triggered email to go to your customers after they leave your establishment asking them for a rating. If the rating is good, you can follow up with links to the popular online rating sites.

Plus, with Bloom Intelligence, you can monitor all of your Facebook and Google reviews – and respond to them – easily in one single platform. This can save a great deal of time and effort.

Just Ask Them

There’s nothing wrong with asking happy customers to give you a review. When you see a guest having a pleasant experience, strike up a conversation. Then ask them to visit a site like Google or Facebook and share their experience.

Requesting a review while face-to-face with your customer can be incredibly effective. According to marketingland.com, “asking in person can garner you seven to eight times more reviews than asking via email.”

Strike At The Right Time

Yes, a mixture of good and not-so-stellar ratings can appear more authentic to internet surfers, but you obviously want a lot more of the positive ones. When asking your patrons for ratings and reviews, look for those who:

• Are outwardly having a great time
• Are “regulars” at your location
• Dwelling longer than your average patrons
• Compliment your food or atmosphere
• Finished their entire meal
• Gave a large tip

These customers can become your best online advocates, so be on the lookout for them and don’t be afraid to ask for a rating or review.

Go Where Your Customer Go

You can ask for ratings and reviews online, as well as in person. The key here is to find out where your customers are online. For instance, if a large portion of your customer base is active on Facebook, make sure you have a company Facebook page that you are actively posting and commenting on. This engagement generates trust, loyalty, and comfort.

This applies to any social media channel. The time you spend engaging with your customers will be well worth it. And when they feel comfortable with you online, they’ll likely leave you a more positive review when asked.

Offer a Reward

Asking for a rating or review is a very effective way of increasing positive online ratings. So why not reward customers who rate or review your restaurant? You could offer every customer who gives you a rating a free item from your menu or a discount.

Make Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Measure Customer Sentiment

Customer sentiment is an important aspect of running any business. Knowing how your customers feel about your restaurants can allow you to make changes in your marketing and operations that will further improve your restaurant’s reputation.

Customer ratings and reviews are the perfect avenue to collect and understand customer sentiment.

Furthermore, using AI can make the process fast and the results simple to understand. For example, Bloom Intelligence offers AI-driven word clouds to show a graphical image of positive, neutral, and negative words and phrases from all of your reviews on Google and Facebook.

In the image above, green is positive, grey is neutral, and red is negative.

You can easily see what your customers like about your place of business, and what could use improvement. For instance, using the example above, you can see that customers enjoy your food, but are frequently upset by your limited parking and long wait times.

The video below is a webinar that details collecting customer ratings and reviews, and measuring customer sentiment to improve your business.

Be Best at What You Do

Above all, you should always strive to present the best food and drink with amazing service in an incredible atmosphere. When you do this, great ratings will inherently follow. And when you begin encouraging customers to give you ratings by following the tips above, you’ll be sure to see increases in overall foot traffic, customer frequency, and customer spend.