BooRah - Inside the Buzz

Last week, we launched a new website ( check out new site here). With this launch, not only do we cater to consumers who are looking for great dining recommendations but also to restaurants who are looking for equal footing in managing their reputation online.

We’ve created a new “Restaurant Dashboard” that allows the restaurants to track new reviews each week, get trends of reviews & ratings, and manage repeat diners. Participants of our loyalty program  get detailed reporting including  diner registrations, private reviews, survey results and other data.

About 3 months ago, we launched a “Customer Loyalty” program for restaurants. The main focus was to allow the restaurants to reward repeat diners for their loyalty while collecting private, but direct feedback on their experience. In talking with our restaurant customers in the past few days, it’s great to hear them say how much they love what we’re doing and how we are uniquely positioned to foster an ecosystem where consumers and restaurants participate alike.

For starters, here’s how BooRah helps restaurants manage their businesses - these are all FREE services

 Track Reviews - BooRah aggregates reviews from various review sites, blogs, and professional critics and generates a weekly summary report for the restaurant - this helps them track all the reviews about their restaurant at one place

Enhance Listing - A restaurant owner can claim their restaurant and manage information about the restaurant. One can upload pictures, provide links to a menu, add a brief description, or offer discounts to consumers

Useful Links & Blog -  Online Restaurant Marketing contains valuable information for restaurants and what they should be doing to build up awareness on the Internet.

The “Customer Loyalty” product  allows restaurants to track their loyal diners and reward them for their loyalty. Unlike other loyalty programs, where only the restaurant knows how many times a customer has dined at their restaurant, the DineTrak system  offers visibility to the diner and the restaurant as well. It not only tracks each dine event but captures valuable survey about their dining experience and written feedback.

All the survey data and feedback is visible only to the restaurant unless they explicity choose to make it public. Restaurants love to (as we would all) get feedback from actual diners and improve on their low-points without necessarily telling the world. Infact, the restaurants can directly reach out to the diners and extend their zone of influence.

Now here’s the most interesting by-product of this program -

Our core technology, the semantic engine,  generates ratings for food, service and ambiance from user reviews & blogs across the Internet. We have done multiple benchmarks against best rating sites and have proven that we are better or equal than those through use of technology alone. We now have an additional data point to benchmark our service against, survey results from actual diners. I’m glad to report that using the 2 months of data from surveys from loyalty program customers, our semantic rankings are completely inline with actual diner ratings. We’re very happy with the quality of the semantic results and ability to correlate them with actual diner feedback - something, that in the longer run, could be the underpinning of a consistent rating system across all local businesses.

We’re staging a new look for BooRah here. Over the past few months, we’ve received a lot of feedback and we’ve tried iterate on some of it. The biggest area of focus was to reduce the clutter of links and text and organize the page flow a bit better.

Do the web pages look better now?  Did we reduce some of the link and text clutter from our current version of restaurant search website here.

You’ll also notice a new feature on our city profile pages and restaurant detail pages to showcase some of our semantic meta data. Each restaurant detail page now features “Top Sentiments” from all the reviewers across all the sources we’ve aggregated and you can instantly get a gist of what’s popular at that restaurant. The city profile page now shows, “best-of” categories for you to explore various dining options. E.g Mountain View city page offers recommendations such as “Best Weekend Lunch ” at Cafe Baklava, “Best parties” at Xanh Restaurant and “Best Lunch Buffet” at Amber India.

Take our new website for a spin and let us know what you think.  Please leave feedback in the comments section here.