Online Customer Review Tracking Tool

[andrewc]

hello restaurant owners,

my background - i am an engineering student looking to develop a new web service geared to the food service industry (specifically to help the local mom and pop restaurants in my community in Canada). i am here asking for some input if this idea would be worthwhile pursuing and to hopefully understand the interest level.

the idea - restaurant owners would login to a website that aggregates customer reviews geared specific to their industry

why its useful - my assumption is that most restaurant owners are too busy to spend time to go online and research what customers are saying about their industry (ie. what foods/decor/service they like, what they don't like) and knowledge such as customer reviews are often overlooked/ignored simply because the complexity of gathering it and the time required to do so. the second problem i'm trying to solve is, "which of my competitors should i be keeping my eye out on because they are gaining popularity online?". This would help identify industry/cuisine specific (ie. Greek food) competitors to keep an eye on (ie. their social presence) and aggregate public information about them (again saving you time to find these review sites, and identifying who to check out)

how i would add value - you might think, "well i can simply go onto sites like Yelp and read it myself"; where i come in to help is I aggregate and compile more relevant information specific to your industry and your physical location from multiple review sites to save you time. for example if you are a greek restaurant - i would first use an algorithm to determine 3 leading local greek restaurants that you may or may not know of, and provide you reviews from multiple different review sites so you can read what customers like/dislike about them (competitive knowledge). secondly, i will provide a keyword counter which tells you if the most common thing customers are talking about is "Souvlaki" for example. third, i also present the basic company profile (website/blogs/menus/location) if available - these all act as a good benchmark and should help your own restaurant in terms of "direction". how i identify these 3 leading local greek restaurants is based on an algorithm which monitors the "chatter" (ie. which greek restaurant are customers talking about) on review sites. the term 3 "leading" restaurant may be misleading.. more like top 3 "reference" or "benchmark" restaurants. on top of that you would be able to search up nearby restaurants and if there are reviews about them, it would show up.

would appreciate any feedback so I can deliver something useful to this industry!

THANKS!!

Edited January 19, 2012 by andrewc (log)

[Mette]

Great idea. I'm not in the industry, but you may want to look at something like socialmention.com for inspiration

[andrewc]

hello mette,

definitely have! socialmention is a great site and is geared more to social news (ie. celebrity, new technology, etc). unfortunately it doesnt include Restaurant Reviews. it does pick up Tweets quite well regarding restaurants but those are small notes like "I've just checked into Moxys". So far I find it not very informative to restaurant owners.

there are also services originally designed for hotels and slowly moving to restaurants to collect reviews. from my research they start at $150/mth and have a lot of addition fees like ($300+ start up setup fee).

cold calling restaurants don't work very well because all the operators are extremely busy and have no time. so i am here to get a feel of what people think (ie. out of 100 local mom and pop's.. i think only 1-2 would be interested; it's not useful enough, etc)

thanks for the input!

[ElaineK]

Do you have a big enough review pool to make it feasible? That is, if you look at all the websites you want to aggregate from, over a three month period - how many new reviews are there for the top three greek restaurants in your community? And how many of those would be useful to -other- greek restaurants?

[pastrygirl]

I'm having a hard time seeing a big need for this. I think most restaurateurs know who their competitors are, and the successful ones don't necessarily care about the details of what the others are doing. I think good managers do find time to check their yelp reviews and address the negative ones. I guess if a business was really struggling and couldn't figure out why, your service might come in handy.