The explosion of online reviews has ushered in a brave new world for restaurants—one that's not easy to manage.

From Google Reviews to Yelp to even TikTok, restaurants are struggling to keep up with the chatter surrounding their restaurant(s), and it's hurting them.

A recent survey by PYMNTs explored just how essential online reputation management is for restaurants, and the results are telling:

TL;DR? Online reputation management for restaurants is no longer a good business practice—it's essential for long-term success and sustainability.

But many restaurants are failing at it, and we plan to fix this. We'll break down the 4 major problems plaguing good restaurant online reputation management, and the sneakily easy solution to each.

Problem #1: The ever-expanding review and social channels

Problem #2: The tedious, time-consuming response burden

Problem #3: The "who's responsible for what" dilemma

Problem #4: How do you make sense of feedback and reviews

The Solution: An online reputation management platform

Problem #1: The ever-expanding review and social channels

Think of all the places customers can leave reviews. For older guests, it's not unheard of for them to write a letter and send it by mail. But for younger generations, they primarily leave feedback through an online channel.

So to start, we have both offline feedback and online feedback. And the online feedback is where it gets complicated. Here is a list highlighting just some of the main online feedback and review channels restaurants need to keep track of for online reputation management:

Keeping up with all the places where guests can leave feedback and reviews gets more challenging each year, as new channels are introduced.

Problem #2: The tedious, time-consuming response burden

Once you have your head around all the different review channels, it's time to actually manage and respond. But what should you say?

• If it's a good review, a simple acknowledgement is great.
• If it's a bad review, check out our step-by-step guide for how to best respond.

Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. Because once you multiply this process by all the above platforms for each one of your restaurants, your head might do something like this:

It can feel like there's no limit to the time it takes to effectively manage your restaurant's online reputation. If only you didn't have an actual restaurant to run, right?

Problem #3: The "who's responsible for what" dilemma

Something worth noting: we realize that many fast casual concepts with multiple locations typically have a guest services team managing their feedback and reviews. But after doing a few discovery calls with them,, here's what we discovered:

Nobody knows who owns what.

• For some, Guest Relations manages offline, direct feedback via the website, and online reviews like Google, Yelp, etc.
• For others, direct feedback was handled by Guest Relations where Marketing handled all online feedback.
• For most fast casual concepts we've spoken to it's a bit of a free for all—shared between guest relations, marketing, area managers, and restaurant managers.

In short—there's no process in place. And when there's no process in place, things get missed and mismanaged.

Problem #4: How do you make sense of feedback and reviews

You have all these reviews, you're doing your best to keep your head above water and respond to them—but what about optimization?

Most restaurants are so consumed with putting out little fires everywhere with their online reputation management that they don't have time to understand where they're going wrong, and how to improve.

And so the vicious cycle continues, with many restaurants constantly feeling behind or throwing in the towel when it comes to online reputation management.

The current process is a lose-lose. But if you've stuck with us for this long, it's time for the big reveal: An easy, far less time consuming solution to restaurant online reputation management.

The Solution: An online reputation management platform

Our team at Akira couldn't believe the manual process restaurants had to go through to manage their online reputation management. But we couldn't find a better way—so we built one.

Here's how Akira easily solves all 4 of the above problems:

1. Aggregate, holistic view: Akira combines all of your restaurant listings and all of your guest feedback (regardless of where it comes from) in one place to ensure you don't miss anything. It helps you prioritize which to respond to first, and gives you an easy-view of where responses stand so everyone on your team is on the same page.
2. Streamlined listing & response management: With the help of AI, Akira can push automatic listing updates for all of your locations and even generate very human responses for your feedback/reviews, significantly cutting back the time and effort it takes to do both.
3. Designated ownership: With all of your listings and feedback in one place, designating people to effectively manage it becomes much simpler. It also keeps team members accountable—as they can see exactly what action they need to take.
4. Prescriptive restaurant reputation insights: Akira generates a restaurant sentiment scorecard that visualizes exactly how it's performing. Uncover and resolve problems before they escalate and know if you're trending in the right direction. In short? Take action on the feedback and reviews to optimize customer experience.

Take charge of your restaurant's online reputation. See what Akira can do for you.