Everyone knows Yelp right? If you are looking at trying out a new restaurant or thinking about booking a hotel, in fact, if you are thinking of doing or going almost anywhere these days, then Yelp is probably the place you visit first. If it has five stars, great, fours stars, yeah ok, three stars, hmmm, two stars, yeah forget about it, one star, well, nothing else to say is there. So yes, everyone knows Yelp and more than likely (nearly) everyone uses it.
You may remember then that back in June, Yelp launched a new ‘Message the Business’ tool which as the name pretty well describes allows users to be able to message a business directly. The idea behind this was that if you had a good or (probably more importantly) if you had a bad experience then you could tell the business directly. No waiting for them to log on and check your message or comments. Using this tool, the business would get the message, literally and figuratively speaking. Well, according to Yelp, users certainly are taking advantage of this tool with a reported 55,000 messages being sent to businesses every month. With so many messages hitting businesses, you can probably be sure that they are not all glowing reviews and instead a number of them are not so happy with the service or products messages.
Well, with Yin must come Yang and now today Yelp have announced the launch of the ‘Yelp For Business Owners’ app. If you haven’t guessed yet, then this app allows business owners to directly respond to customer feedback and messages. You might have thought this feature should have been included in the original app, but it seems it was not. The new app will allow businesses to receive real-time notifications on incoming messages and comments, will allow them to respond directly either via a private message or a public comment. If you are a business owner and interested in the app then it can now be downloaded on the Play Store and runs on all android devices running Android 4.03 and higher. Are you one of the 55,000 a month who currently uses the previous app to let businesses know what you think? Like the idea they can now too complain about your complaints? Let us know what you think.