Yelp Announces New Restaurant Solutions To Better Reach Diners and Save Consumers Time
September 12 2019 - 9:00AM
Business Wire
People can now receive updates directly from
their favorite local restaurants with Yelp Connect and new Waitlist
features help them plan life better
Yelp Inc. (NYSE:YELP), the company that connects people with
great local businesses, today announced new updates to its
restaurant product offerings with the launch of Yelp Connect and
new Waitlist features to help increase diner traffic and customer
loyalty. Yelp Connect is a new way for restaurants to build their
brands and share updates from their Yelp business pages and on
users’ Yelp homescreens. New Yelp Waitlist features include
Predictive Wait Time and Notify Me. These features help restaurants
spread out customers to less popular dining times and enable people
to better plan their dining experience, saving them from waiting
outside restaurants.
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Yelp Connect is a new way for restaurants
to share updates with consumers. (Graphic: Business Wire)
Yelp Connect and Waitlist demonstrate Yelp’s increased focus and
continued investment in developing solutions that bring value to
both diners and restaurants on the platform. These products are now
available for purchase by logging into the Yelp for Business Owners
site or the Yelp Waitlist site.
“Yelp Connect and Waitlist have helped us become an integral
partner to restaurant owners as we evolve from a business discovery
platform to a destination where consumers not only discover, but
also interact and transact directly with businesses,” said Devon
Wright, general manager of Restaurant Marketplaces at Yelp. “We’re
focused on helping restaurants build stronger relationships with
customers by extending our products across the diner journey —
everything from finding a restaurant, getting seated, writing
reviews and staying connected afterwards.”
Yelp Connect
Yelp Connect empowers restaurants to market themselves on their
own terms and capture the right audience by sharing posts with new
and existing diners, such as new menu items, happy hour specials
and upcoming events. Restaurant owners will have full control of
their updates, including setting end dates for posts about
limited-time offerings. Anyone on a participating restaurants’ Yelp
business page can now see updates from the business, and diners can
stay in the know by following their favorite restaurants.
“Yelp Connect has given me a place to share information directly
with existing and potential customers. It’s a great way to present
your restaurant exactly how you want to be presented,” said Kathryn
Gianaras, owner of NOVY Restaurant in San Francisco. “Being able to
scroll down our page and see our own photos and updates that we
posted makes us look a lot better on Yelp and is helpful for our
guests to see. Plus, I like that I can set expiration dates for my
posts, especially for holidays and events so I can set it and
forget it.”
Unlike other social platforms, Yelp Connect restaurants
typically start out with many followers. These followers consist of
users who have previously shown high intent with their business —
such as using Yelp Waitlist or Reservations, leaving a review and
bookmarking a restaurant for later. Yelp Connect is a paid
subscription that costs $199 a month, but will be available to
early adopters for a special limited-time offer of $99 a month.
Yelp Waitlist
Yelp Waitlist now offers more convenience than ever with
Predictive Wait Time and Notify Me — new features that improve
efficiency for restaurants’ front-of-house operations, and help
people plan their next meal out from the comfort of their home.
Yelp Waitlist, which is available to clients starting at $249 a
month, now features:
- Predictive Wait Time uses actual restaurant wait time
data, not location data, to display the best times to dine at a
restaurant, helping restaurants drive customers to less popular
dining times. Diners will now find a simple bar chart to better
anticipate or avoid longer wait times.
- Notify Me enables people to schedule a reminder on Yelp
to join the Waitlist for their favorite restaurants, so they can
enjoy their day rather than worrying about when a wait time may
suddenly spike. After users indicate the size of their party and
when they’d like to eat, the Yelp app will send a push notification
when it’s time to join the Waitlist.
“Yelp Waitlist has been beyond wonderful for us at The
Lighthouse Cafe, and our team is extremely pleased with the results
that we have seen after adoption. The new Predictive Wait Time has
brought in more business during traditionally slower hours, which
our diners have even mentioned in Yelp reviews,” said Tad Belshe,
operating director of The Lighthouse Cafe in Newport Beach, CA.
“Waitlist has helped us reach more people and we’ve seen tremendous
improvement with our guest drop off rate. Since implementing
Waitlist we’ve received a significant increase in traffic to our
website compared to previous reservation systems we were
using.”
In 2018, Yelp introduced new Waitlist products and features such
as Yelp Kiosks and On My Way, to streamline both digital and
physical restaurant management processes. According to Yelp data,
diners seated through the Yelp app return to the same restaurant
twice as often as other diners, Yelp’s wait time algorithm is
approximately twice as accurate as host estimates, and 81% of
diners say they're more likely to come back to a restaurant with
Yelp Waitlist. Eats in San Francisco, for example, saw a 17%
increase in business with the help of Yelp’s more accurate wait
time estimates and front-of-house management, according to General
Manager Ixchel Acosta.
With Yelp Connect and Waitlist, Yelp is continuing to help
restaurants foster meaningful connections and maintain loyal
customers, while seamlessly connecting people with great local
businesses.
Download images here. For more information and Yelp’s latest
metrics, visit: https://www.yelp.com/factsheet
About Yelp
Yelp Inc. (www.yelp.com) connects people with great local
businesses. With unmatched local business information, photos and
review content, Yelp provides a one-stop local platform for
consumers to discover, connect and transact with local businesses
of all sizes by making it easy to request a quote, join a waitlist,
and make a reservation, appointment or purchase. Yelp was founded
in San Francisco in July 2004.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190912005257/en/
Julianne Rowe press@yelp.com
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