The Importance of Online Reviews for Restaurants
Introduction
Positive customer reviews can help to garner impressive brand recognition and increase revenue for a restaurant. With 89% of customers claiming that they won’t take action until they read reviews, it’s vital for business owners to capitalize on this oftentimes overlooked marketing mechanism. Contrastingly, negative reviews can greatly impede your restaurant’s success. In fact, 94% of consumers say a single bad review has convinced them to avoid a business. This illustrates the importance of not only having many reviews, but reviews that are verified—ensuring the feedback you receive is from customers who have made a legitimate purchase from your restaurant. The ever-shifting landscape of review platforms, coupled with the rising problem of fake reviews, can make the process of collecting verified feedback overwhelming.
Understanding the platforms
A good place to start is understanding the major players in the restaurant review platform space and why customers rely on reviews to make dining decisions. Customers mainly read restaurant reviews for a few reasons—to help reduce the risk of dining at a new place, to avoid a potentially disappointing experience, and to alleviate lengthy search times associated with finding new or the “best” restaurants.
Below are four of the most widely used restaurant review sites:
Google My Business is a popular and free tool that allows people to promote their business through Google. Restaurants are one of the more prevalent industries that use Google to capture customer feedback with the average restaurant having 220 reviews.
Yelp is one of the most frequently used customer review sites, especially for restaurants. The Yelp restaurant category continues to receive the largest number of reviews followed closely by home and local services.
Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world with 2.2 billion active users every month. Boasting an immense reach and influence, the app has become a go-to destination for customers to check business ratings.
TripAdvisor is the world’s most robust travel guidance platform featuring more than 934 million reviews. Many people refer to this platform for direction on which restaurants, hotels, and tourist attractions to visit while traveling.
For a more comprehensive list of top restaurant review sites and tips on how to effectively monitor and manage your restaurant’s online reputation, check out our blog, “The importance of online customer reviews for restaurants.”
Combating fake reviews
Fake reviews are quickly becoming a rampant problem for many review platforms—82% of consumers have read a fake review in the last year. False reviews (whether positive or negative) can diminish the level of trust a restaurant has built up over time with customers. Consumers and businesses post fake reviews for a myriad of reasons—to get a discount, to tarnish a competitor’s reputation, to poach potential new customers, to simply troll a business, and more. Some people even create additional social media accounts to be able to leave fake positive reviews for their own business.
Red flags to look out for when trying to detect phony reviews include:
- Reviewers that use nicknames instead of their real full name
- Timestamps that don’t align with your business
- Extreme ratings (high or low)
- An abundance of exclamation points
- The same user posting multiple reviews in a short time
- A poorly written and vague account of the experience
- Reviewers that have not posted any other public reviews
A recent study showed a close link between restaurant reviews and a business’ bottom line, meaning that being able to decern and remove forged reviews is more crucial than ever for restaurant owners.
The Rewards Network difference
We understand how important it is for restaurant owners to obtain legitimate feedback to accurately understand where their business is thriving and where it requires extra attention. That’s why, for all Rewards Network restaurants, customers can only leave a review if they’re a dining member and have made a verified purchase at the business. These parameters alleviate the threat of fake reviews and allow restaurant owners to receive accurate and substantiated feedback from their customers. Generating more than 20 million reviews at participating restaurants, Rewards Network members tend to review their restaurant experience right after dining.
Rewards Network provides its restaurant partners with industry data and insights with the goal of helping them to drive more efficient processes and revenue. Recently, we aggregated data from a random selection of our “Tier 1” restaurant partners that have been active in our program for at least nine or more months. Focusing primarily on data points related to customer reviews, we looked at how often Rewards Network members completed reviews for restaurants compared to non-members.
Here’s how Rewards Network’s customer review platform stacks up against other well-known restaurant review sites.
Out of 13,466 Rewards Network member dines over the past six months, our restaurants boasted an average review completion rate of 10%.
In comparison, out of 327,672 non-member dines at participating restaurants over the past six months, there were only 1,491 reviews received via Google, Yelp, Facebook, and TripAdvisor combined. That’s an average review completion rate of less than 1%.
The Rewards Network program restaurant with the highest member review completion rate comes in at 23%, while the highest non-member review completion rate is only 1.5%.
Highest review completion rates
On average, a Rewards Network program restaurant has a 10% review completion rate for members, whereas that same restaurant has a non-member review completion rate of only 0.38%.
Maintaining consistent engagement with customers while garnering useful feedback and insight is a top priority for many restaurant owners, but not always an easy goal to achieve. In fact, a study found that 50% of restaurant customers will never write an online review and 34.3% claim they will only write a review for a restaurant “once in a great while.” Rewards Network combats this trend by providing restaurants with members that value earning rewards and providing restaurants with feedback, shown by our impressive review completion rates. By making the restaurant review an organic part of our program’s process—prompting members to leave a verified review right after they dine, sending reminders if they have not reviewed their latest dining experience yet, and encouraging customers to provide insightful feedback to their local restaurants—Rewards Network restaurants are able to maintain a robust online presence while gleaning valuable information from customers. Plus, our My Rewards Network portal allows restaurant owners to easily reply back to member comments.
Conclusion
A positive online presence can be a powerful tool to attract new customers to your restaurant—customer reviews are the fuel that drives this online presence. That’s why it’s essential to ensure your business’ reviews are verified so you can obtain qualified feedback that paints an accurate and compelling representation of your restaurant. It’s through legitimate feedback that business owners can begin to outline necessary refinements and changes that can positively affect brand recognition, customer experience, and your restaurant’s bottom lin
Want to learn more about how Rewards Network can help your restaurant grow?
Contact us today:
restaurants@rewardsnetwork.com
(800) 617-6067