**|Tech Planet
text|Lin Jing
Liu Jing is the director of a Hunan restaurant in Beijing, and one of her important jobs now is to observe the needs of customers at each table, and if customers need to add drinks or dishes during their meal, it is the best time for her to promote the "write a review and give away merchandise" campaign. She will tell customers that if you give the restaurant a five-star rating on the platform and write a short review, you can get some desserts and ice powder products in the store for free.
Liu Jing's Hunan restaurant has a score of 4 in Dianping8 points, in addition to maintaining a high score, she is more worried about a customer giving a low score, "if the customer gives 3."5 stars, for a restaurant, is a low score, I will be deducted 300 yuan if I appear once", Liu Jing told Tech Planet.
For F&B companies, an important part of online operations is scoring. A high rating usually means that the restaurant has a higher weight on the platform, especially for restaurants in shopping malls and tourist cities, which is also one of the key factors influencing customers' dining decisions.
However, the other side of the coin is that today's young people who are rebellious are beginning to brave 35 out of 5 for such a low-rated restaurant. After being "created by some restaurants with high customer unit prices and poor taste", they got a food experience that exceeded their expectations in low-rated restaurants with low prices and no exquisite decorations, and they rushed to recommend them.
Young people revenge squeezing 3Topics such as "5-point restaurants" and "low-rated restaurants may be more delicious" have repeatedly appeared on hot searches on social platforms. Behind this is a collective resistance of young people with more rational consumption to fake high-scoring restaurants.
The method of improving the score of catering enterprises is very involuted, and Gao Lei, who operates a variety of catering formats such as hot pot and Western food in Nanjing, is deeply touched by this.
Catering companies can usually buy promotion fees through third-party institutions or go to the platform to improve the operation level of online stores, Gao Lei told Tech Planet, but the common problem we face is that we can only achieve short-term traffic growth, and we must regularly cooperate with the launch of low-price ** or participate in some ** activities.
For example, he once bought a daily promotion fee of 1,500 yuan, which cost 45,000 yuan a month, and the effect was obvious in the short term, the customer flow could increase by 30% or 50%, and the store score also increased rapidly, but after half a month, there was no effect. "It's quite fascinating to spend money to buy traffic", in Gao Lei's view, this is tantamount to "drinking doves to quench thirst" for catering companies, which is difficult to last long.
Nowadays, the common method used in restaurants is to visit customers before, during and after meals, but it is necessary to select employees who are more agile in the store, or employees with higher ranks. Gao Lei emphasized that this is because the restaurant score depends on multiple dimensions such as taste, service, environment, and **, and if it causes customer disgust, it is self-defeating. For example, when a customer asks for a drink, the employee prompts them to bookmark and review the restaurant to get the drink for free, and the likelihood of rejection is usually very small.
The other form is the overlord meal. V7 and V8 users like Dianping are high-frequency users of winning the lottery Bawang meal, and they are also the target of catering companies competing for cooperation.
After upgrading to V7 this year, Zhang Yue has received many invitations from merchants to cooperate. These businesses are mainly chain catering enterprises, including McDonald's, which is close to 10,000 stores. If the distance is far, catering companies will promise to reimburse the fare, and some catering companies in popular tourist cities are more involuted, and will also give an extra red envelope to the talent.
Zhang Yue was once invited to a new McDonald's store to eat a bully meal, and then wrote a review, inviting his store manager to say that the store had an assessment at the end of the month, and if it did not meet the standard, he would be fined.
It is worth noting that these catering companies cannot clearly say good reviews, but only comments, because once the word "good reviews" appears, it is expressly prohibited by the platform, and as long as users complain, catering companies will be punished.
Compared with V7 and V8 users, store explorers are now more popular, Zhang Yue said, "A head store explorer can bring fire to a restaurant." ”
While some restaurants are racking their brains to improve their scores, others are focusing on deleting bad reviews. One user who has had several experiences with this here told Tech Planet that this usually happens in 48～5.In a large chain restaurant with a score of 0, the staff in the store will call frequently, and the usual rhetoric is that if it cannot be deleted, the employee will be deducted from his salary, which makes him feel embarrassed.
In terms of scoring operation and management, catering companies will set up different reward and punishment measures. The bonus set by Gao Lei's store is: if there are no bad reviews in the store in the current month (25 stars and below), all employees will be rewarded with 500 yuan. If there is a bad review, the employee will explain the last change to the customer, and the bonus is 200 yuan.
Gao Lei revealed that after calculation, the cost of each store is 150,000 yuan to 20,000 yuan, about 120,000 yuan for the whole year. Compared with blind fines, Gao Lei believes that the reward mechanism can better motivate employees to improve the restaurant's rating.
It's not that you can't afford to eat in a 5-point restaurant, but 35 points restaurant is more cost-effective. The owners of high-scoring restaurants who have worked hard to run high-scoring restaurants probably wouldn't have imagined that this generation of young people will start to take revenge on low-scoring restaurants.
3.The appearance of the 5-point restaurant will also bring the director of "A Bite of China" Chen Xiaoqing to fire again. He once mentioned on a talk show that some restaurants with good tastes usually have a rating of 35 to 4 points.
According to a restaurant owner to Tech Planet, after the general restaurant opens an online store, the basic score is 3A score of 5 will drop the restaurant's score unless there are negative reviews, and it will remain at 3 if there is no online operation5 points.
Tian Tian is a senior food lover and a Dianping v7 user, in her experience, 35 is just an approximate average, and many of the restaurants she used to eat at did not reach a 4. These restaurants are generally 3 to 5 years old, the stores already have a stable source of customers, and the repurchase rate is high, the restaurant owner is most likely not good at operating an online rating system, and even did not enter the online platform.
In addition, there are some more tonal private dishes, Tian Tian introduced, such as some Chinese-style izaka, the pursuit of all-round quality, the taste of the food is also good, but ** is generally more expensive, and the user rating is not high. But behind the high premium, users are actually paying for the restaurant environment and service.
3The restaurant owner of 8 points told Tech Planet that after the opening of the new store this year, many operation teams approached her for cooperation, but she refused. At present, the store mainly relies on some loyal old customers to obtain stable income, she said, the restaurant rating operation is determined by multiple dimensions, such as customer review intensity, not 10 people give 5 points, the average score is 5 points. If there are fewer people, the score will be lower. And the store should regularly put on some ultra-low discounts**, otherwise it will also have a low score.
In fact, behind the explosion of low-scoring restaurants, it also stems from the fact that in the past two years, many Internet celebrities have explored stores, and they have won more traffic attention by visiting low-cost restaurants.
In addition, in popular tourist cities and county areas, high-scoring restaurants are no longer the preferred factor for users' dining decisions.
Taking Tian Tian's Zhejiang region as an example, many seafood stall owners have used crazy overlord meals to quickly increase their store scores and attract foreign tourists. "But in fact, a lot of the seafood used by these restaurant owners is unknown to us locals, and they have invited some foreign chefs to make some dishes that locals can't understand," Tian Tian said, adding that the most authentic local food is often not the so-called high-scoring restaurants, but hidden in the streets and alleys.
Many county restaurants also do not pay attention to rating operations. Wang Yong, the owner of the restaurant in the county, introduced to Tech Planet, "Compared with the first and second-tier cities, the county seat is actually a place with a bigger palm, and you can quickly drive around the city two or three times by driving a car. ”
In the past, there were also catering bosses in the county who would invite a lot of big V users to improve the score through the form of overlord meals, but the effect was average, and now there is almost no recurrence, Wang Yong introduced, because users in the sinking market like to brush short**, and now the county catering marketing is more popular is that the opening of new stores will invite more than 100 store explorers in batches, and the goal is to make all users in the county can brush the restaurant under the algorithm mechanism recommended in the same city.
3.The popularity of the 5-point restaurant has once again sparked discussion about the trust of the catering rating system.
On the one hand, there are indeed some restaurants with inflated ratings, and it is difficult to distinguish between true and false stores**, which makes users frequently "step on thunder", especially when users participate in activities such as praise cashback or writing reviews to participate in in-store **, they will naturally begin to doubt the authenticity of high ratings.
As a senior food lover, Tian Tian has summed up a lot of experience, usually some newly opened stores, if suddenly many people plant grass, full of comments, it is likely that the merchant spends money on organized publicity. When screening restaurants, she never looks at any indicator roughly, but picks out comments and looks at pictures one by one. "I can tell at a glance which ones are promotional images and what are stolen images. For example, the angle of repeated text is the same, and the pixels have been compressed and blurred. ”
In the view of restaurant boss Gao Lei, the aroma of wine is also afraid of deep alleys, and some restaurants with relatively remote locations, as well as restaurants in shopping malls, still rely heavily on ratings to attract consumers. A lot of 5The restaurants with 0 points are basically opened in the business district, with an average consumption of more than 400 yuan per person, and it is not how good the taste of the dishes is, but also through high-end decoration, to create a dining environment and service concept.
But consumer needs are changing, and they are more rational and more cost-effective. In particular, young people have also set off a wave of reverse consumption, in the process of consumption, they no longer blindly pursue famous brands, luxury goods and other goods, but pay more attention to the practicality of the goods themselves.
The same is true in the catering scene, Gao Lei said, because open flames are not allowed in the mall, so many high-scoring restaurants are actually pre-made dishes, and users are prone to complain that they have spent ** money, but the taste of the dishes is average. In contrast, in some affordable restaurants, the chefs are freshly fried and cooked, and the main thing is delicious and affordable.
However, 35 points restaurant is more like a process of "digging for treasure", which exists in a small number of catering enterprises. As one netizen said on social platforms, "Less than 3It is not recommended to try a restaurant with a score of 5, just like Douban 6Film and television dramas with a score of 5 do sometimes hide some niche good films, but Douban's 3 points must be outrageously rotten. Kunpeng Project (Note: All names have been changed.) ）