Online reviews and reputation play a big part in our daily decision making than we realize. For instance, I don’t watch movies that have an IMDB rating of 7 or less. Maybe, if I’m in a good mood, I might let a 6.8 slip in every now and then.
That’s how high our bar is as a consumer these days. With the myriad of options available to us, whether its entertainment or food, it only takes a couple of negative reviews for us to swipe left on a restaurant for that Friday night dinner.
I have a cousin who is big on writing reviews for every restaurant he eats at. For context this was before I joined Momos. Considering that he was not getting any financial or social incentive for this, I was baffled as to why he continues to write reviews years on end without fail. The more I thought about it I realized that the whole idea of online reviews is a way to bring power back to the people. He felt empowered that writing these reviews got his voice, and his opinion, to be heard.
What does this mean for restaurants?
Obviously this can all go horribly wrong. And sometimes it does. Us diners can use these tools to forcefully squeeze out an apology from the restaurant when the problem/incident wasn’t that significant to begin with. So are the diners at fault? Absolutely not. In the words of Bruce Almighty, “That’s [just] the way the cookie crumbles”.
Restaurateurs can learn to understand that even though online reputation management can be a daunting realm to operate in, there are ways where you can continue to focus on serving incredible food and proving great experiences to your customers and bolster your brand’s reputation online to great heights.
So where does Momos come into this picture?
We’ve built the capability to allow you to bring in all your customer feedback on one surface; whether its your food delivery reviews or your Instagram direct messages. Moreover, we understand that trying to comprehend and address all this feedback can be a daunting task. But that’s where we come in.
We help you understand this feedback through our Analytics platform, flag any burning feedback that needs immediate attention and also ease the burden on your team to reply back to this feedback with your own custom Chatbot and auto-responses for reviews. We understand that there is no utopia where all your customers’ feedback is handled through automation. But the idea is to have a hybrid approach where we take care of the most mundane commonly asked questions and you take care of the incidents that need a more white-glove touch.
Don’t discriminate
We believe that all customers should get the attention they deserve regardless of the channel they reach out to you on. Why does someone who posts a public review get faster and better attention than someone who reaches out to to you via your ‘Contact Us’ page? It’s still the same customer, just a different channel. Which is why we built ‘Momos Forms’, where you can plop in a customisable form into your Contact Us page which funnels that feedback into the same Unified Inbox that all the other feedback sit in.
Big Picture
It’s very easy to step away from all of this and say, “I can’t manage all of this, it’s too much. I’m just not going to care about my online reputation!” I understand it can be overwhelming. However, borrowing from some self-help gurus, I implore to you accept it. Accept that there are times when your team will get things wrong and make mistakes. Accept that some customers might take advantage of you. Accept that the customer is always right. Because in the grand scheme of things — these interactions and appeasements are small fluctuations magnified. Step back and view the macro to see that those same interactions and appeasements are propelling your business forward and upwards.
Our product team here in Abu Dhabi has been hustling to get this last release out. It’s a massive step change for us in how we’re digitally empowering our merchants to take back control of their reputation and attract more and more customers.
There’s no product out there in the market today that is building a reputation and growth management platform specifically only for restaurants.
Curious to know more about Momos? Learn more by visiting https://www.momos.com/
