#reviews-2

[pankajchaddah]

Our take on the Lemp incident

First things first, what has been written in the blog, should not happen to any customer. Doesn't matter how the customer behaves in a restaurant/bar, it just shouldn't happen. This is not the way hospitality businesses should treat their customers. Now, we have been getting quite a few requests to delist Lemp from Zomato. What we think is that delisting Lemp would be the stupidest thing to do. Zomato is a neutral platform where consumers write about their opinions and we respect that. Our job is to tell our users if they should go to a particular restaurant or not. Delisting restaurants defeats that purpose. For restaurants which are very poorly rated, we want our users to see their ratings/reviews and decide not to visit that place. A few other things some people have been saying about Zomato: Zomato displayed wrong information about the Lemp event on the website Zomato only displays what is sent to us via email by the restaurant owners or their PR firms. So essentially, all these offers are validated offers from the management itself. However, whether the restaurant eventually honours the offer is entirely up to the restaurant. In this case, what has been outlined in the blog against Lemp is that the manager even confirmed the offer on the phone, but refused to honour it on the premises. There is nothing anyone can do about such behaviour. Zomato deletes negative reviews (and/or lets restaurant owners delete reviews) This is the silliest thing we've heard today. From our point of view, we run a neutral platform, and letting restaurant owners pick the reviews they want to display on that page would violate that neutrality. For us, customers come before ad dollars. Lemp was a paying advertiser for a long time, for about more than a year. But you can see a slew of negative reviews on their page which are as old as Lemp itself. Those reviews were never deleted and have been there forever for everyone to read. Anyway, in light of the incident and to honour the sentiments of our users, we took the ad down. As I said, customers before ad dollars. Having said that, our moderation team does delete reviews (and no, restaurant owners cannot tell us what we should do). What our team does is that they manually weed out fake reviews (planted by restaurant owners, and their competitors) and also remove low value reviews. Sometimes, they also remove reviews with a personal vendetta against an establishment - such reviews are easily identifiable because the reviewer admittedly says that he/she hasn't been to the restaurant anyway. To put some examples behind this, reviews such as this get deleted: "Fuck this place. I don't like it. This place sucks. I will never go here again." "I haven't been to this place, but I just read the review below. I think this place sucks." "Awesome. Cool. I think this place has the coolest restaurant owner ever. The waiter, Bob, is one of the nicest people I have met." We also delete reviews which are from the same IP address, and also use user behaviour pattern detection to flag fake reviews and ratings. However, in any spam control, there are a few false positives, but that is a cost we pay to keep the system clean. === Next steps for us: we are implementing a widget on our reviews page for a restaurant where you can filter reviews which are 1/2/3/4/5 star rated specifically. Currently, you have to scroll through a chronologically stack of reviews to find out why some place is not good or worth visiting. We hope that this helps our users make a wiser choice, the next time they visit Zomato to find a perfect place to eat/drink.

[pankajchaddah]

Monetizing editorial content? Stick to the basics.

Zomato’s almost 4 years old now. And our primary revenue model is advertising. Advertising from restaurants – yes, the very ones which you see, rate and review on Zomato. Being a local search platform, we very much have the technological ability to modify the ratings or reviews of a restaurant and drive footfall to that business. But we have never done that and are very clear that we will never compromise on our content for revenue. This is indeed a difficult line to draw - here are some tidbits of the challenges we face while maintaining our stand. First, let me give you a couple of specific examples: 1) When we launched our print guide, there had to be only a couple of hundred restaurants included in the guide. The concept of a print guide that we were putting on the table did not give us the liberty to be comprehensive. We had to be selective. In Delhi NCR region alone, we have about 300 restaurant businesses advertising with us. A large chunk of these was not a part of our print guide. While we could have included all/most of our existing clients and made an effort to up-sell print advertising to them, we chose not to do this and instead create a product which our customers would enjoy. 2) A newly opened restaurant got a bad review on its page, and due to the credibility (# of reviews up-votes on reviews) of the reviewer, this bad review always showed up as the first review on its page. This restaurant owner called us up and proposed a significant sum of money as advertising fee if we took the review down. Needless to say, we did not do that. We face such (or similar) problems more than twice every week. Now let's get to the end result of both these things. The success of our restaurant guide, driven by the mood based themes, something unique in the market - proved our hypothesis. Customers love the selection in the guide and have sent us emails on how different and better we are than the other print food guides in the market. This is a much bigger win than revenue. Here, advertising revenue is getting more than balanced by the actual sales figures. Which is what we value much more than anything else. We have had umpteen restaurants over time offering money to take a review down. I can vouch that most of these restaurant owners who have tried to offer us money for reviews have seen their business shut down in the next 3-6 months. Lesson: ruining Zomato’s reputation for short term money makes zero long term sense. There is a positive side to the whole picture. A lot of young entrepreneurs are opening up restaurants. They run businesses which take negative feedback in their stride, improve their food/service and if required, reinvent themselves to survive. We love working with such restaurant owners – these are people who believe in creating good products. So far, maintaining our stance of editorial integrity has paid off very well – both tangibly and intangibly. And luckily for us, there is a sizable number of restaurant owners we would love to work with. Still, we face a problem of spam ratings and reviews by restaurant owners on their restaurants and competing restaurants. And we work our asses off to keep that under control. But that is a story for another day.