The Restaurant Technology Guys Podcast brought to you by Custom Business Solutions
The Restaurant Technology Guys Podcast brought to you by Custom Business Solutions
Harnessing AI for Restaurant Reputation Management with Akira's Co-Founder
Harnessing AI for Restaurant Reputation Management with Akira's Co-Founder
In this episode of the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast, the hosts sit down with Shereen, co-founder of Akira, to discuss the importance of online reputation management for restaurants. They delve into how Akira uses AI to streamline reputation efforts, manage online reviews, and deliver actionable insights to improve customer experience and branding. Shereen shares the origins of Akira and highlights the significance of consistency in customer feedback and online listings. The discussion also covers the challenges of managing reviews from third-party delivery platforms and the impact of reputation scores on revenue.
00:00 Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:28 Meeting Through the Podcast
01:17 What is Akira?
01:30 Importance of Online Reputation
04:28 Origin Story of Akira
06:17 Challenges in Reputation Management
12:47 Consumer Behavior and Review Sites
20:13 The Importance of Accurate Information
20:27 Consistency in Business Listings
21:55 Managing Third-Party Marketplaces
22:32 Handling Reviews and Feedback
25:40 Guest Recovery Strategies
30:37 Consistency and Reputation Management
34:36 The Impact of Ratings on Revenue
38:00 Getting Started with Akira
Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. I thank everyone out there for joining us. As I say each and every time, I don't take your time for granted. So thank you guys for hanging out today. I'm going to introduce you guys to a co founder of a pretty cool product. And I got introduced to her technically through the podcast, but, but then she, shared, with another podcast guests that she was looking to talk to me on the show. why don't you introduce yourself real quick? Let's talk a little story about, about how you heard about, the, our mutual connection. And then we can talk a little bit about, what Akira is doing.
Shereen Qumsieh:Yeah. So we actually, met our mutual connection, Michael Beck through your podcast. we were listening, listening in one day and we were just at the position with Akira where we wanted to, we wanted to work on our go to market strategy. And it was exactly the things that, that Michael was talking about on the podcast. And we reached out, and the very first call that we scheduled with him, I think both our backgrounds, we just, we started to nerd out with each other for the next, hour and yeah, we just hit it off immediately. and, we've been working with them ever since. they're just a blast, a lot of fun, really good at what they do. helping us with, identifying our messaging or our ICP, talking through the product of care and what we're trying to do and what we're trying to solve. So that's how we met. That's how we met Michael.
Jeremy:Yeah, we were talking a little bit about it before I hit the record button. So it's funny when I have guests on that have heard about somebody else that told him, Hey, you should be on the show. so clearly it worked enough that, that Michael and team at popcorn got, got in touch with you. So what is Akira? tell me a little bit more about what Akira is. Cause I think you guys are fitting in a unique spot with what your product launch looks like and where you guys are at. Cause I think it's a little bit different. And I know we're going to dig quite a bit into that today.
Shereen Qumsieh:Yeah, absolutely. for us, what we're learning, what we're starting to see, what the data is reflecting is, a restaurant's online or a brand's online reputation, it determines how prominently, they feature in local search results, what the perception is from the customers around their brand and, how they're responding to their guest feedback and their reviews. So paying attention to it, doing sort of the work that's required to maintain at least, a healthy reputation, being able to baseline and then measure that, is becoming more and more important, especially with, everyone's just online these days, everyone, we naturally go to Google or Apple Maps or whatever it happens to be, and we're searching and we're trying to find and determine where we're going to eat, what we're going to buy, what we're going to do, and so all of these things matter. And so we streamline. All of those reputation management efforts so that they're easy to do. we know we leverage AI strategically so that the things that can be done quicker, a little bit easier with less manpower, we do. and then what we try to deliver as a part two to that is the prescriptive insights. So you've got all the table stakes work for us of, responding to your guest feedback, trying to win back your customers, managing all of your online reviews, making sure your listings are accurate and consistent where everybody's searching. for listening. But then what information or insights can we discover? What conversations can we start? And I'm a big, I think people have heard me say this. I'm a big fan of storytelling with data, right? And and for me, it's about starting those conversations. if I'm delivering, a scorecard or something to an operator versus maybe it's the C suite level or the directors of ops, I want them to look at it and go, Oh, that's interesting. That, why is this coming up? So why is this theme coming up so frequently? And then we can drill into kind of some stuff. Why are people like, this is interesting. We get a lot of incorrect order complaints at this location. Why? And yeah. Really trying to deliver those insights so that they can start those conversations. And ultimately we want to see improvement. We want to see improvement at the individual, perhaps location level, but then also at the brand level. And if you don't measure that stuff, if you don't just simply shed a light or a lens on it, then how can you really know if you're improving or doing better? And I think Paul and I and Chad and Mike, we've talked about this a lot, this concept of, Ghosting your customers, for example. So if we take one of those pillars in the online review space, there's a lot of companies out there still ghosting their guests. So not responding to either direct feedback or someone might leave you an online review and just simply not responding. and it, I just with kind of with tools out there, like reputation management tools, like I care, there just isn't a reason not to, or to be ghosting your guesses. it really hurts you from a reputation management perspective. I think it's. It, yeah, we got to do that table stakes work and that's where we help.
Jeremy:and one of our previous guests from a couple of years ago was the lady that runs Yelp for restaurants, and she talked about exactly that. And I do want to dig in later in the show about the different platforms that are out there that are helping with this. But can you give me the origin story? Where did Akira come from? Why restaurants? Why reviews? Why, how for those that are watching on video, and we talked about the Michael Beck geeking out on stuff like, World of Warcraft doesn't pose as, online gaming doesn't pose its way into restaurant reputation management. So talk me through the origin story.
Shereen Qumsieh:totally different worlds. many moons ago, many years ago, my parents or my families, my uncles as well, we had, they had a couple of franchises. So they had a couple of Mr. Subs and a Robin's donut. And I think my whole life has been, my parents have always owned either a restaurant or something. Or we've just been in this hospitality industry. and when I first transitioned, so I, my background is in software engineering. When I first transitioned out of school, I didn't work for others for very long before I started my own, software development consultancy. And we worked in the industry. So one of our very first customers was, a large food service company in Western Canada, and we would build custom software for them. so things that they couldn't buy off the shelf and they want to be able to do it in an affordable way. and then have us maintain that. And one of the things that. It was my first aha moment building. One of the first applications we did was called, it was the butcher shop application and really what it did, the simple, explanation of it was it shed light on waste. And until we had that measurement and we were able to just, I think I mentioned earlier, point the lens or tell the story. They weren't, there was no way they were going to be able to improve. And so just by virtue of doing that, We started to see improvement. So now we had this baseline of, this is where you're at from a waste perspective. So the, now let's make improvements. Let's, and so just by measuring it, we were able to see things get better. butcher shop operate, they started to compete, like they started Hey, how come we're doing so poorly? How can we, it's fun. You gamified in a way it's fun. and you can drive improvement that way. So we did that for many years. And then I had. An old colleague of mine approached me and they were struggling with finding a solution that could help them with reputation management. And they didn't want to go down the road of having to purchase multiple different platforms that can give them, everything that they needed that was important, right? That was the baseline in terms of being able to manage the guest feedback, their reviews and their listings. And so we, that's where Akira was born. That's how we ended up Building that out and keeping it. like for example keeping transparent the pricing really transparent really easy to understand It's not you got to bolt on add ons and there's additional costs. It's just a flat simple easy to understand pricing structure and so keeping that easy And building out the features in a kind of a very storytelling way, which is another thing that I don't, it's a unique position that we're taking. so you're not going to find a lot of, you won't find pie charts or dashboards. You're going to find like we call it the location scorecard where you can just read through as if you and me are having a conversation, you're an operator and you're like, hey, what's going on? And I can just. here's what and we measure things like NPS and sentiment, but what we often find is if I just tell an operator, your sentiment is 24. What does that mean? They're going to say to me out of is that good train? is that bad? And so We give them like, again, in very in a, just in a conversational way. if you're sent, if you have a sentiment of 10, which generally means your guests are indifferent, which means your customer retention is at risk, that's all language they understand, and that it's very clear what that means. And so we do that throughout, from everything to their sentiment score, to their theming. what does it mean if I have a high NPS, but a low sentiment? so we really spell that out. So it's super clear for them and they don't have to do any sort of mental. Gymnastics. I like to call it to and I do that sometimes. I don't know if you've ever, even if you have a team or you've built out a dashboard and you come back three months later and you're looking at that dashboard and you go, what is this? What
Jeremy:What does that actually mean? What am I supposed to do with
Shereen Qumsieh:actually mean? What? And what part should I focus on? What? What is the part so we're constantly, one of the things that we've had to do is rewire the way we think where we're, your instinct is to just put up the data on a dashboard, but really, what you're trying to do is, what are the actual pearls or the nuggets of information that are worth Sharing and not all of it is you don't have to just dump it all up there. and then you hope that your operators or your restaurant owners on the other end can decipher it. Just give them the information that actually matters. So I'll give a really specific example. We've got, the concepts of themes and sub themes. We're trying to identify from a guest feedback and review perspective. What are your customers communicating? And so if a theme comes up, let's say I'm analyzing 100 reviews. Jeremy, if a theme comes up once or twice, I don't actually present it to an operator, but if it comes up 30 times. Absolutely. This is what I want you to focus on. So it's really being strategic and prescribing the insights that I think are worth starting the conversation or doing something about and not getting boggled down by the noise. Because it is, it can be noise. If you're dealing with kind of all the online review sites you can aggregate feedback from and you've got all your direct feedback channels, there's a lot of noise there. So it's distilling that down to what they need to pay attention to.
Jeremy:and I say, I've been, first and foremost, I didn't pick on you because we didn't get more than three minutes in before we start talking about AI and how AI is going to do stuff. So we'll talk more about how that's helping. But really, there's two things that almost happen on every single show. I also always say technology for technology sake is worthless. And The technology that's going to drive business behavior, drive guest behavior, drive, staff behavior is critical, which is really where I think, I love that you're a technologist that is trying to drive business value rather than a technologist that just wants to put the coolest looking widget, pull the coolest looking gadget, having the fastest, whatever, the fastest, smartest, whatever, because none of that matters if ultimately it doesn't make the brand any better, make the guest satisfaction any better, make them come in more or any of those kinds of things. And
Shereen Qumsieh:exactly. And for me, I'll tell you a funny story. When we originally had pie charts and dashboards and bar graphs and all that. And I was in a meeting with one of our larger customers one day. And I said, show of hands, who's looked at this and who knows what we're trying to convey here. And they were honest. it was a little sheepish, like nobody put their hand up, but, Yeah. And we had the data right to support that, that it wasn't used as much as we might've thought that it would have been. And so I went back to the, my team, I went back to the drawing board. I'm like, this isn't working. this is, there's too much of a lift on their end to have to understand what we're trying to convey. It's our job, the kind of the storytelling analogy I like is, if you've got a hundred oysters and you're looking for those pearls, you don't just, You know, throw two pearls out of a hundred oysters. You don't just throw a hundred oysters at your customers. here's the data you just. Talk about those two pearls. You've gone through the data. You've determined what is valuable. What is interesting? That's what you throw up on those screens And so we completely revamped it and then what happened was I started to get questions Emails people saying can we add this and what is this? can we drill into this some more and that's exactly the types of conversations I wanted so we knew that We were on to something, from us, from the perspective of a better storytelling and so we've taken that lens throughout the application now where we're revisiting some of the things we had designed a year ago and we're revamping it from a storytelling perspective, but if you, yeah, so if you listen to them and you just take a minute, you'll probably realize that very few dashboards in the world. are actually, utilized or leveraged the way that you might think they are. they're just not, people don't have the time or the energy or the bandwidth to try to make sense of it.
Jeremy:And now a word from one of our sponsors. Every restaurant operator understands the chaos of a Restaurant kitchen during the meal rush restaurant technologies, oil, total oil management solutions, and end to end automated oil management system that delivers filters, monitors, and recycles your cooking oil, taking the dirtiest jobs out of your kitchen and letting your employees focus on more important tasks. Control the kitchen chaos with restaurant technologies and make your kitchen safer. No upfront costs to learn more, check out rti inc. com or call 888 796 4997. Yep, no agreed. I'm going to ask just because I so and this is a little bit of a personal story. So I was traveling with my family a couple weeks ago. We were in Northern California doing some wine tasting and we had three generations are really two generations. It was me and my siblings, but my youngest siblings are 17 years younger than me. And so the way that we did restaurant activity as it related to review sites was very different. Talk me through what you guys are finding. So I have my parents, my stepmom and my dad, I've got me, and then I've got my siblings who are in their twenties. Late twenties and I'm in my late forties. And very different the way that they interacted. And so I want to ask you to riff a little bit on just how much power the consumer has and how, depending upon what your brand is, it changes the way that you need to interact because me as a mid forties, your old father, sick, father of four, six people in my family. interact differently than my sister who is not married, has no kids and she interacts with the brand differently. She's looking for different things. and when she gets to a review site, even the way she read the exact same review was different than the way I thought. I'd love to get any insight that you might have. because I think it's interesting because I think brands don't think about this. And oftentimes we think about it from I'm the CEO. I'm 60 years old. And I think about the way that I live versus the way that my consumers and the people that I'm interact with my brand.
Shereen Qumsieh:I was just talking. I was somebody, but that yesterday where you were as kind of owners or operators, we have to be careful that we don't, have that bias where, I don't go there to search for things. So by that assumption, neither do my guess, which is couldn't be further from the truth. I do want to ask because that's a really interesting story. did you find that they went to different places to assess? were some people going to Google reviews and work? Okay. And what was
Jeremy:my kids and I well, so my kids make fun of me. So I have a my oldest is 19 My youngest is eight. and we will Especially when we're traveling most time when we're here We go to the same 12 places that we're going to go to but when we're traveling or we're going to go out of town. I go to yelp because I grew up with yelp My kids grew up with apple and apple map reviews and my wife Enjoys Google reviews. And and oftentimes there's a big dichotomy, even in what the number of stars are on all of those three places. So my kids finally said to me, maybe two months ago, they're like, I finally downloaded Yelp dad. I'm so tired of you sending me links to restaurants saying, can we go there? And it opens up on a web browser and it's, crappy. I finally downloaded that stupid old person app that you have. And I was like, no, but it's really, so to me, and this is my 19 and 16 year old that were picking on me about it. So yes, my siblings were using one tool. I was using a different tool and my parents, quite frankly, were using a third tool, for those things. So Google. Yelp, Google Yelp and Apple Maps were the three that, in my own family, my own, nuclear family, and then with my extended family. So yes, very much
Shereen Qumsieh:Yeah, so that's what we see. So for us, again, going back to, I think I mentioned, we take an opinionated stance on, for us, Google business profile and Yelp are the big ones. and Apple in a lot of places actually leverages Yelp for its reviews. Currently, like while they might be trying to roll out their own review engine into the future, there's still a lot of places you will search and then it'll be Yelp reviews behind the scenes. And so those are the two big players for us that we integrate with. and so a couple things you for us, it's important that as an operator, as a brand, you're responding to both of those places. Not, we talked about earlier, not ghosting your guests. So it's just showing up and it demonstrates. I think a level of care. If you are showing up and you're responding, we can probably also assume that then you're driving insights, hopefully from that, right? if you're not even showing up and you're not responding, then we can probably go, this brand doesn't really care about what anybody has. To say, and then typically you might go to their website and they don't even have a way to contact them there either. you can probably visit on site and, there's probably not even a way there, whether it's a QR code on a receipt or some of, so they're not, so their feedback is not important to them, which actually speaks volumes about that, the brand in that customer. or that restaurant. So you really have to be present in those places. And that's a harder thing to do at scale, right? It's. it to be able to craft those responses to maybe train it on your brand, your voice, and have it be done in a consistent way across, you might have corporate and franchise on locations. I get that's hard to do. And sometimes that's not an easy thing for multi unit, locations or brands. And so that's why you would leverage a reputation management solution. So it's just, for me, the first part is showing up and curious your feedback, Jeremy. Like when you look at. If you're on Google or if you're on Yelp or whatever it happens to be, if you see responses from the operator and it's either genuine, there's a desire there to resolve or win back the customer. There's even a way to close that feedback loop because one of the things we advocate for with Google Business Profile, for example, you don't have the contact information of the guests that left the review. That's not something that Google gives you. You don't have their email address, nor do you have their phone number anyway to contact them. And so the only thing you can do is say, Hey, we're, sorry about the experience. We want to make this right. Can you please contact us over here? And so we help businesses, either they'd have an email address or maybe we, they can leverage a really simple survey to then have that guest, bring that feedback offline, hopefully win them back and then very genuinely and organically. Solicit an update to the review, if it makes sense. We don't always do it, but if it makes sense, absolutely, right? And Just having that in place speaks volumes from a brand perspective, from your reputation, it affects your reputation, it affects your perception, it affects the trust consumers have. And that would be the first step. Pillar for me. the second one that we see, Jeremy, that's interesting. I'm curious if you've experienced this if you're in for your bit, you're basic table stakes information about your units or your location. So things like your name, address, phone number and hours of operation. If that is incorrect, it is inconsistent across where people search. Not only do you see an influx of negative reviews or feedback, it, it really, it, there's, it builds strong detractors. It's very rage inducing. We find that when you've gone to the effort, you've planned, you've maybe coordinated with multiple people. Google business profile says you're open till 10 and you show up at nine and it's closed. So it's,
Jeremy:So that actually happened. That actually happened, ironically, we, cause we, there was 14 of us. So we were trying to find dinner for 14 when my brother's flying in from the East coast, and he's not going to land until nine o'clock. And now we've got to find a 14 top between nine and 10, somewhere between San Francisco and Sonoma. The exact same thing happened. And it was hard. And I spent. A good hour trying to find a table and then my sibling said, we found a different review that said this place sucks. We're not going there. And so this is why the story is so relevant to me. And obviously I didn't expect this to come up, but it was, but it genuinely happened. and. That was super frustrating because the site said they'd be open until 10, he was going to be in town at 9 30. Yes. I realized that. And so I called saying, Hey, you know what? I just want to make sure that you guys can take us. And at the same time, because I'm a restaurant person, I care about, the quality of their people's life as it was a Sunday night or something. So it was a, it wasn't a fun thing to take a 14 top on a Sunday night, a half hour before you close. I did want to make sure that, and they were, and they're like, yeah, unfortunately we're already closing. I'm like, What do you mean you already closed your website? Says, and they're like, yeah, we need to go update that, which goes back to your point. And so I was a disappointed guest. They missed it. opportunity for probably a 300 check for that evening. And now what is that opportunity that you, if I would have driven all the way there with three different cars, I can promise you we would have been even more pissed.
Shereen Qumsieh:exactly. and it it breaks that trust a little bit. And if it happens more than once, I've had this happen to me where I've, I, you look at the, I use Google, that's my go to I'm on my phone. I, are you open? It says it's open. I show up. It's actually closed on Mondays. We see that a lot. A lot of places closed on Mondays and Tuesdays and I totally get it. People need days off. I appreciate that. I just, I need that to be up to date so that I don't, put all the effort into getting over there. Maybe I've got friends. I've got kids, like that's not an easy thing. Then they're starving and then it's where do I go next? I'm already all the way over here. it's important. For me, it's table stakes. It has to be accurate. It has to be up to date. But what you find at scale, Jeremy, is it's overwhelming. businesses don't often know where to update that information. does consistency matter? Absolutely. Google will penalize you if you're inconsistent from a ranking perspective. we talked, the three pack, being able to actually get into the three pack and appear when people search, you're going to get penalized. If your website has one number, Google business profile has another, then you go over to Yelp and it's a completely different thing. And so that stuff has to be consistent. this was something that our customers were communicating to us, originally, we were feedback reviews. We added listings because we didn't want them to have to go to yet another. solution and pay a high monthly fee because they wanted to syndicate to, those sites advertise like 150 plus directories. there's really a handful that matter in my humble opinion. And so we take this position of we'll make sure we syndicate where 95 percent of the world searches. and that, that's going to get you where you need to go in terms of just making sure your listings are accurate and you're not frustrating your guests. You're not losing potential future business. because it's, if that, if, That experience for yourself. You might go next time. I don't know if I'm going to even consider this location because I don't trust that they're going to be open or they're going to, unless I have to call them and that, we're, I'm a generation of, I don't call if I get, if you're not accurate.
Jeremy:I was told you've got to go figure out a place for everybody to eat because everybody's coming into town and I'm like, I didn't sign up for any of this crap. But at the end of the day,
Shereen Qumsieh:exactly. Yeah. So yeah, no, you go ahead.
Jeremy:I was just going to ask. you've got the big two that you talked about, Google and Yelp and, I'm sure there's some other ones, Apple kind of uses Google most of the time. What I'm finding. From some of our restaurant clients is that their reputation on third party marketplaces is also a really big deal and people are ordering from those third party marketplaces. talk me through what that looks like. Cause you can manage the first party stuff a little bit easier than you can door dash draw hub Uber Eats and the like. And if you choose to engage in those platforms, you've got to be aware that your guests interaction might be different than it might be on Yelp or Google. Talk me through what you guys are seeing in that space.
Shereen Qumsieh:we see this a lot of the complaints in the reviews and the feedback that come in are a lot of times a reflection of, There's something that went wrong between location has packaged and prepared the takeout order to, oftentimes when it arrives and there's some great companies out there that sort of manage, if there's a dispute or an issue or what have you, we're not into, we don't handle that, but what we will do is, we'll report on what those reviews are. are, if you want to aggregate them in and then respond to them, we can do that. But yeah, it's a different, it's a different type of animal I find. And what you want to do and what we're careful with is making sure that the reviews that you get in those platforms are not mixed in with what you would receive as a direct feedback, or even just Yelp and Google are different to me, right? That's, it's, that's more direct, feedback that reflects like somebody was actually at your location and they had a dining experience or what, and then maybe the service wasn't great or the ambience or something was not working. So we like to keep those things. things separate. Again, it's, we're trying to deliver those insights. and we want to be careful with how we muddle those two together. Both are important. Both are relevant. but yeah, we treat those a little bit differently.
Jeremy:and I think to your point, that's part of why I wanted you to go down that path. There are things that are going to coincide. The salmon doesn't taste good. the new sauce that you have on the salmon, if that's a feedback that you get, whether it's dine in or take out, that's Probably something you need to react to and respond to. Then there's the delivery driver sucked or the, it was too cold or too hot in the restaurant. Two totally different experiences and are not going to be, are not going to be down that path. But I find that restaurants get so myopic because they only have a certain amount of time. And if they're not using a tool like Akira, they don't know how to deal with all of it. And so then they decide to put their, what I call the ostrich. Just put your head in the sand and do nothing, which is not an option, which is part of
Shereen Qumsieh:Yeah. Yeah. You don't have analysis paralysis where you actually do nothing. And so many of the issues, like even myself, like I, I know I don't order takeout from certain places just because I don't think it's. food that is takes out well, right? And and if I make the decision to do I'm not going to leave a review because I know that's not a reflection of what that experience would have been had I been there. And so it's a different thing, right? It's a different.
Jeremy:expectations are different. My,
Shereen Qumsieh:right.
Jeremy:yeah, I'm playing world of Warcraft and I need food because I have, I don't have time to go eat. I'm here, I'm going to take what I get. Last piece that I'm going to, I'm going to take this thread. I was talking to an executive recently and he said, 70 percent of their bad feedback comes related to food quality. And the food being correct. And so everybody's struggling trying to figure out, and this is aggregated across all of their platforms, dine in, take out first party, or third party. ketchup didn't get in the bag. They put beans in the burrito and it wasn't supposed to be there. they chose brown rice instead of white rice, but that the food that came out, it's not just about it being too hot or too cold. And as more and more people are doing off prem and trying to grow their off premise business. Guest recovery is really hard. Guest engagement is really hard. So talk me through how you guys are thinking about that, and how Akira might be able to solve some of those problems.
Shereen Qumsieh:Yeah, that's a really good question. So let me touch on the last bit there where, guest recovery can be hard. So what we do see is if you're, If a review ends up in the online public forum of things like Google or Yelp or even some of these third party ordering sites, we find, based on the data, it's actually harder to recover those guests. In a lot of ways it's more of a fire and forget. even if you do give them a channel to follow up with you directly, it's, they often don't, we see less than 10%. For example, this is what kind of our data reflects with our customers that actually follow through. So you, someone's left an online review. You say, Hey, we want to resolve this. Like we are genuine in our desire to connect with you, figure out what went wrong so we can communicate with our location. And then we can resolve and win you back very few actually take anyone up on that offer. But. What we advocate for is you got to get ahead of those. And I think that's a valid strategy. Your mechanisms for collecting feedback directly have to be as easy, if not easier, than them leaving them online or in the, that doesn't mean you can ignore online. there's going to be guests that are just going to do that anyway. And even if you can win back 10%, 10 percent is still significant enough to pay attention to it. so we can't, we'd. I see some companies that just do a direct feedback strategy and they completely ignore the rest. And I don't think you should do that, but you can absolutely get in front of, so have really simple ways. Either it's, like we see a QR code at the bottom of a receipt, depending on the type of, company you are, if it's like fine dining or whatever it happens to be, you often have their phone number, their email address, and then post visit, you can actually, Solicit just a really quick. Keep it a simple survey that you can then gauge what that experience was like with their what feedback they want to give you. and then, talking to Jay last week, I was on his podcast. he had a really, I loved his idea where it's have fun with it from a marketing perspective. Do some fun advertising where it's I think he made some joke about what's this as good as your mother in law's casserole and then we realized that was probably a bad example. have some fun with the marketing where you would, you can solicit more feedback genuinely at that moment as the guest has maybe just finished their dining experience, they're sitting. Sometimes you might just, you could have a little kind of a QR code that's maybe just maybe in the menu or anyway. So there's many ways that you can do it. But we encourage businesses to do it. And what we find is, it's a pretty high, like it's almost a hundred percent of the time. You not only have that guest contact information, but when you reach out to them, they respond. And then you can actually have a dialogue and then you can resolve, win them back and then, and build that loyalty. so that's from a strategy perspective, we help with that. Because a lot of businesses, like they're not aware of what they can do there, what the options are, how they would do it. Is it okay to do it? Like they often ask me, Hey, can we, if someone has left an online review and then we resolve it, can we ask them to update the review? I'm like, yeah, as long as you're not saying, Hey, can you now give us five stars? that's not the approach we advocate for, but absolutely does that, does your online review still reflect the experience you just had with us, would you be willing to give us an update on that? So I think all of those things are valid and that's where we help with all of it. So to Build out that inclusive reputation management strategy. Yeah.
Jeremy:genuinely tell you that when I go look at a review site, they give feedback. So two stars on this, the mill was cold or whatever owner responds, somebody in charge responds, and then the user, Updates the feedback. It gives me more cause to want to go to that brand because I realized they care and I see it and they're as Sean Walsh says, they're working in public. They're out there showing the world that they recognize that they need to get better. They want to get better. they're not. I also think if I were to ever run for president in the United States, I would make everybody work in retail and make everybody go work in restaurants to deal with guests because the expectations that, are awful and the way that people, I grew up in the restaurant business. I grew up working, selling dollar 99 grand slams at Denny's. That was my first waiting table job. I was making sandwiches before that. And so
Shereen Qumsieh:I started at McDonald's. Yeah. I always say, I feel like my kids are going to, I'm going to for, I don't know if I, maybe I can't force it, but I want them to work in, in, in that industry because you really learn a lot about. Customers had it, how to approach, how to deal. It's a really important skillset. I think to have, especially at the start of your career,
Jeremy:Growing your business can mean big time logistical questions like, how am I going to keep up with all these local deliveries? Let UberDirect offer you a helping hand. With UberDirect, you can take orders on your website, via app, or by phone. Then drivers who are part of the Uber courier network will pick them up from your store and deliver them to your customer's doorsteps. Sounds simple, right? Delivery just got better with UberDirect. Check out uberdirect. com to learn more. I tease, I've got four kids and I keep telling them, you are going to, you are going to have to work in a restaurant at some point. Because they've watched me grow and they've watched me manage and all of that all through their upbringing. And they've watched me go out to eat and critique things. I want them to see what it feels like. Because it's important.
Shereen Qumsieh:the other thing too, Jeremy, I thought it's worth highlighting that again, we see this as come out of the data and over the last, year or so running this is, multi unit, sometimes, multi brand, multi concept, you start to pay attention to things like consistency and we know. I, I've said this before, like, why do I love McDonald's? Cause I can go to McDonald's almost anywhere in North America and it's, the cheeseburger is going to taste the same. There's a consi they work very hard on consistency, right? It's, they've almost got it down to a science. and so consistency is important because I think if I'm going to a location here versus one over here, and there's an, it's an inconsistent experience. That's something worth highlighting. That's a story worth telling. That's a conversation worth having. And so we help with that. And again, when you're baselining, okay, here's where we're at each individual location, but then also at the brand level, and then you can start to identify, locations that aren't performing consistently based on the themes, sub themes that you're identifying. And you'll find some brands, if you look at the reviews, you're looking at really simply, let's say the disparity between your lowest ranking and your highest ranking location. Some of them are all kind of 4. That tells me that you are consistent versus if you've got some, so there's things like that, that we help measure, that really reveal some interesting insights, especially when you're, directors of ops and you're managing that. The other thing that we help identify is, sometimes there's a disparity between NPS and sentiment. and what I find, and I'm guilty of this myself is if I really love a brand, right? And I've, I'm there frequently. I'm a, I'm someone that's there maybe once a week, once every couple of weeks. And I've had a bad experience on this day. I might still leave them a five star review, but I might. I might the comments won't reflect a positive experience. I'll just want to let them know that something went wrong, but I don't want to don't want to bring down their rating, right? Especially if they don't have a way for me to contact them directly. And the only way I could do it is through online reviews. And so what you'll find is sometimes you will have brands or locations that will have a high sentiment. And But there are sorry, a high MPS, but their sentiment is low, so their sentiment might be, and so that's important. That is telling a story. You can't just rely on MPS. if you look at the actual feedback that your guests are giving. What story are they telling you? And so that's where we drill into identifying what's going wrong What's going right and helping them take action where they need to so Yeah, that's been an interesting one for me because you know starting off on this you think MPS and sentiment They just those things should align but they actually don't always align.
Jeremy:and I love one of the brands that we go to Austin has a part of their survey, their post meal survey says, based on your last experience, how would you rate this meal? Not overall, but based on your last experience, how would you rate this meal? And then they've done a good job of tying it into the menu data. And they say, did you have one of these three menu items and how would you rank it based on quality value? whatever,
Shereen Qumsieh:they're measuring
Jeremy:stuff, but they're measuring consistency of that new menu item and they, again, this brand happens to be a brand that we go to with the family of six, and they typically pick two to three menu items on there that were on that guest check. And sometimes it's not the meal that I ordered, and I don't give it a rating. And sometimes it is, and I give it a rating, and I let them know. And I know from that brand specifically, because I know the executives there, they do something with it. And oftentimes, if I order a new menu item that I've not ever had in my basket before, they Always ask about it, which is really good to get feedback. That says, did you like this item? And can we now market to you and, and pivot that,
Shereen Qumsieh:Exactly. Exactly. And it's, yeah, I don't feel like we're, we talk about it enough, but consistency is a big, it's a big thing in our vocabulary here at Edekira. It's helping brands measure that because I think it's, it, when you're inconsistent and you're inconsistent too often, you're retention, your guest retention is at risk, right? And you end up not only potentially losing the loyal fans that you might've already had, but you're not even going to build new ones. And so it, and all of it goes back to, again, you look at the data, higher online reputation or higher reputation scores, better revenue, those locations, those brands outperform, they
Jeremy:that was going to be my last question for you is, do you guys have statistics? I know there's been some that have been thrown around. I've heard, that the percentages going from five stars to four stars to three stars is like just crazy. And if you're below three stars, you don't even show up hardly at all. I guess educate our listeners that are still listening, almost 40 minutes in. What does it mean to do it and do it right, to your top line revenue? Because ultimately, it comes back to how do we get more guests in, more satisfied, coming more often, buying more. That's really what we're looking for.
Shereen Qumsieh:you nailed it. So again, I'll go back to the very first step for me is baselining. How do you know where you want to go if you don't even know where you are? Today. So we have to measure where we're at today. And once we're able to identify that we figure out the big disparity between our highest performing lowest performing locations from a reputation management perspective, right? then we can start to strive for what I think is the ideal sweet spot. So there's a lot of data to tell us that, you don't want to be in the threes. You want to, 4. 2 to 4. 5 is maybe 4. 1, 4. 5 is a sweet spot. You don't actually want too high of a rating. People don't often trust that. There's this skepticism that goes with, if you've got a five star, they're like, is
Jeremy:Hadn't thought of
Shereen Qumsieh:Yeah. So there's a lot of data that supports there's a Goldilocks zone for that. And again, it's baselining, and then we With the prescriptive insights, taking all that feedback, building that 360 degree view of what your guests are communicating so you can go into. if there's a consistency location over, thing happening over here, fix it. and then just being able to see over time, you want to see that start to trend upward and you want to aim for that goal. So we aim for that goal for everybody. and it's, again, it's just the starting point is to baseline it so that you can measure that improvement. And then you get locations competing in a gamification kind of way. why is my, and one other thing I'll throw out there that I thought was really interesting. This came up just about a couple months ago where we had, an operator come to me and say, I've got a particular location that's they're standing behind there. They've got one of the highest Google ratings across the brand, but we know that the NPS and the sentiment doesn't reflect that. And so what we did was we took that Google rating, we broke it down and said, what is it? How, what has it been in the last 90 days? And it's actually, it was sitting at 2. 2 or something. Yeah, so the all of a sudden it's and again, this is the lens that I look at. What story can I tell? So what can I do? How can I present this information that sparks that conversation? That's actually, I get that you're sitting at a 4. 1, but you've actually been at a 2. 2 for the last 90 days consistently. A couple times it's happened. And so you're just going to eventually, because it, depending on how old the Google business profile is or how long it's been around, and you've got thousands of reviews behind you, that number doesn't actually change all that much. But you really want to know when it's starting to trend like this. And if it does that long enough, then it's going to start to decline. You're going to see that reflected in your sales and revenue. You're not going to know why you're not going to understand what's happening or what's going wrong. yeah, we thought that one was really interesting, but just adding that was just like,
Jeremy:and because you have the data, you're able to slice and dice it to be able to tell that story. And the story may have been the exact opposite. They may have been killing it, and you just, you don't know until you look at the data and then make decisions based on
Shereen Qumsieh:You're right. It could be a, maybe it's a 3. 8, right? But they've been consistently at a 4. 5. And we just need to now wait that out and keep that trend. And we know that rating will eventually increase over time. yeah, it's being able to measure that and see where things are trending.
Jeremy:Awesome. I've now just sat through all A math class on what I should be doing to do this. How do I learn more? How do I get engaged? How do I talk to somebody on your team about, about what it looks like to put a care in inside of my business?
Shereen Qumsieh:two easy ways. You just visit helloacure. com. And we've got a way to contact us on there. But I'd love to hear from people directly. So if you just email Shereen at helloakira. com, it'll come straight to me. and I'd love to have a conversation or even just, dig in. If anyone's got any additional questions, yeah, shoot me an email and we'll go from there.
Jeremy:All right. Awesome. And if you're a Warcraft fan and you just want to talk Warcraft, we're all things Blizzard. I'm sure she'd, she'd take the
Shereen Qumsieh:I love that
Jeremy:a couple of minutes.
Shereen Qumsieh:great. Yeah.
Jeremy:Awesome. Shereen, thank you so much. And thank you guys for your, like the whole team in general. Cause I love. I love when technologists solve operators problems that they have but don't have a way to solve for themselves So thank you for doing that. to our listeners guys I know that like you guys like I said at the onset you guys have got tons of choices So thank you guys for spending time with us today If you haven't already subscribed to the show, whatever your listening slash viewing privilege is pleasure is please do so also if you want to get in contact with me to learn more about what we do at restaurant technology guys Please do so and have a great day
