More and more diners are using online restaurant reviews to make decisions about which eatery they choose. Improving your restaurant star rating can help grow your business and attract more new customers. There is tremendous business value in maintaining a glowing online brand reputation. How can you encourage more customers to leave positive reviews and boost your online reputation?
1. Offer Customers an Exceptional Dining Experience
Offering great food in an enjoyable environment with excellent service will naturally generate positive restaurant reviews. Truthful reviews from customers are an essential source of business intelligence. Making it easy for guests to provide feedback will give restaurant owners and managers the information they need to address any issues and keep focus on the strategies that are working well.
2. Proactively Ask Satisfied Customers to Leave Reviews
As part of asking guests if they are enjoying their meal, encourage happy customers to leave a Google restaurant review or use a QR code for a direct link. Work with any customers who are having a less-than-ideal dining experience on the spot to make sure they leave happy rather than resorting to a negative review of your restaurant.
3. Communicate with Your Followers on Social Media
Having a landing page on your restaurant website to provide reviews will allow you to highlight the positive ones and take care of any concerns before they reach large scale restaurant review sites. Engage with your followers on Facebook and Twitter, and use these platforms to offer links not just to your Google business listing but to widely used restaurant review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor.
4. Respond To All Restaurant Reviews Received
Take the time to respond to positive restaurant reviews with a few words that show how much you value your customers and their feedback. Responding to negative reviews shows that they are taken seriously. Even if the review is unreasonable, a helpful and professional response allows readers to draw that conclusion for themselves. If you are able to resolve the issue, the customer is more likely to amend or change their negative review into a positive or neutral one.
5. Use Positive Reviews to Limit the Impact of Negative Ones
Your restaurant star rating is calculated based on an algorithm that seeks to eliminate fake or false reviews. The rating system computes your overall rating based on the volume of positive versus negative reviews. It is worth the effort to actively work on increasing your positive restaurant reviews to make a few negative ones less impactful on your online reputation for a great dining experience.
Actively Manage Your Online Reputation
Staying on top of your reviews on multiple platforms is challenging and time-consuming. The most efficient way to manage your Google restaurant reviews and those that appear on all other major restaurant review sites is to use comprehensive online review management software. With a single dashboard and alerts to new feedback across multiple major review sites, ReviewInc allows fast responses in an easy-to-use, real-time interface.
ReviewInc allows restaurant owners and managers to check on new reviews and respond quickly to encourage positive reviews and take action to improve every customer’s dining experience. Protect your brand reputation and highlight the style and substance of your eatery with proactive online review management. ReviewInc will help you increase your business with review management software that keeps you on top of your ratings and aware of your growing successes.