Yelp Inc., the company that connects people with great local businesses, has officially announced the launch of its Spring Product Release, bringing forth 15 new features and updates that will simplify how consumers discover and hire service professionals, while simultaneously helping restaurants, in particular, manage front-of-house operations.
Talk about what all is included in the given lineup, we begin from the all-new Yelp Assistant Photo Recognition facility. This translates to how Yelp Assistant, the AI chatbot that connects users with service pros, can now leverage AI-powered photo recognition to automatically identify the service needed from a user-uploaded photo, such as a broken appliance or landscaping project, ask relevant follow-up questions, and match users with the right pros.
The stated feature is currently available on iOS, with Android and desktop support coming soon.
Next up, we have AI-powered response quality badges coming into play, badges that tread up a long distance to highlight service pros who consistently provide helpful, informative replies against project requests.
More on the same would reveal how Yelp now displays response quality badges, such as “Excellent,” on eligible business pages and business listings in search results. Here, the company will evaluate responses based on several factors like whether the business provides a quote or availability, acknowledge project details, and ask relevant follow-up questions, all for the purpose of eliminating that generic “call me” reply.
Another detail worth a mention is rooted in how Yelp is integrating its Leads API with Zapier to empower businesses in the context of automatically syncing leads with more than 800 customer relationship and lead management tools. In essence, Yelp Leads Zapier app allows national services brands to manage leads across locations and more effectively measure ad performance.
“Yelp’s new Zapier integration has been a major improvement for SecureSpace,” said Christian Espinal, marketing director at InSite. “It has significantly streamlined our lead management process, allowing our team to respond to potential customers more efficiently while reducing the internal coordination typically required for lead follow-up.”
Yelp also took this opportunity to introduce new tools for Yelp Guest Manager, the company’s comprehensive restaurant front-of-house solution, provide deeper insights, and therefore, help hosts manage diner flow more effectively.
As for these tools include, we begin from the one focused on conducting guest experience surveys. The said short, automated surveys are expected to provide daily results in a dedicated dashboard within the Business Owner Account. This particular dashboard will highlight ratings across various aspects of the dining experience, including food, drinks, and service, along with staff-specific feedback and net promoter scores.
All in all, such a mechanism should be able to support point of sale integrations for deeper operational insights. At present, these surveys are available as an add-on for Yelp Guest Manager Plus and Enterprise customers.
Joining that would be a traffic attribution dashboard and booking links. Starting from the former, it will come in handy to break down covers by source, time, and day of the week, thus enabling restaurants to better understand guest sources before optimizing reservation and waitlist strategies,
Beyond that, these businesses can also generate custom booking links for social platforms, with traffic from these links tracked directly in the dashboard.
Hold on, we still have a few bits left to unpack, considering we haven’t yet touched upon the prospect of redesigned party management, which now offers an interface with clearer status indicators and quick actions, automated waitlist removal for unresponsive parties, and new shift scheduling tools like calendar view and shift duplication, with multi-section server assignments coming soon.
“In this next step of our product transformation, we’re continuing to harness AI to unlock the potential of Yelp’s rich data in ways that build trust and simplify decision-making—whether users are hiring a pro or booking a reservation,” said Craig Saldanha, chief product officer at Yelp. “Our Spring Product Release brings innovative new features to restaurants through enhancements to Yelp Guest Manager. We’re also continuing to double down on our commitment to differentiate the services experience with an even smarter Yelp Assistant that can diagnose a problem from just a photo. And this is just the beginning.
