According to a survey conducted by BrightLocal, 97% of customers read online reviews before coming into a restaurant, with almost half of those interviewed only trusting restaurants with 4-stars or more. For many restaurants, this is a scary reality with a high potential for negative reviews to negatively impact business. But it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom—when guests leave negative feedback, restaurants have an opportunity to excel at customer service and guest recovery.

Real-time feedback

Restaurants receive countless reviews on a regular basis, making the process of tracking and responding to each sentiment overwhelming. Larry Flam, Boka’s Operations Manager, says. “In the old days we would get some reviews, typically via email, or we would have to search through all of the social media sites.” This way of tracking was vulnerable to human error, lacked scalability, and proved greatly inefficient.

Boka came to OpenTable to aggregate and analyze their online feedback and facilitate the guest recovery process. First, OpenTable aggregated reviews from over 15 sites, including Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google+, Facebook, and OpenTable, across the entire Boka Group into one Feedback Management system.

The Boka team automatically received a Daily Feedback Report with a birds eye view of guest feedback and real-time information. Flam says, “The beauty is we don’t have to hunt down all of the intel, it shows up the next day. As a GM, all you have to do is read it.”

Engagement efficiency

Review aggregation and analysis was only part of the solution. Flam and his team could also directly respond to guest feedback from OpenTable, Google, Facebook, and custom surveys. By centralizing the guest recovery process, the Boka team became more responsive and efficient.

“The feedback we get, positive and negative, all GMs are responding immediately. So it’s great having all of that information available … it makes it easy for us to track down these people who leave reviews and respond to them. So we do, we do respond.”

Guest recovery

Prioritizing the guest recovery process has been a huge success for the Boka team. Response times have fallen and response rates continue to rise. In fact, by responding to negative guest feedback, Boka helped neutralize the effect of negative experiences on guests returning to their restaurants.

Flam says of the new guest recovery process: “Now we almost take this for granted because it’s such a core part of what we do, day to day.”