Digital Hospitality

Rewriting the Rules of Online Reviews | Zack Oates (Ovation Up) | DH081

02.04.2021 - By Shawn P. WalchefPlay

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Your biggest critics are often your biggest fans. But try telling that to a restaurant owner with a Yelp page.

Serving as the founder and CEO of Ovation, Zack Oates is helping rewrite the rules of online reviews by making them easier and more valuable for restaurant owners, operators, and customers alike.

Zack Oates is Ovation Founder and CEO. He grew up in the restaurant and retail world. He went on more than 1,000 dates before he met his wife. He learned about relationships from both.

In any industry, including our own, online comment sections and spaces for feedback are usually dominated by enraged, detailed negativity or quiet, polite praise. Surely a customer base can’t be that divided about the same meal served from the same establishment?

Well, they are not. Zack Oates and Ovation knows this for a fact. 

Zack Oates was a guest on the Digital Hospitality podcast in 2021, where he and host Shawn Walchef (Cali BBQ Media founder) talked in-depth about his life before founding Ovation, his entrepreneuring spirit, finding love, and the power of online reviews.

So, what is Ovation?

Ovation's mission is to "Enable Businesses to Measure, Build, and Maintain Trust with their Customers."

“Ovation is an actionable guest feedback tool,” Ovation's Zack Oates said on the Digital Hospitality podcast. “Now more than ever, it's so important that we know how guests are feeling and what they're thinking.”

 

The Story of Ovation:

For Zack Oates, starting Ovation is the sum of his life experiences up to this point.

As a kid, Zack grew up working at his father’s barbecue joint. When he went to college, Zack’s eyes turned to tech, eventually leading him to building and selling a company in that space. Still, he was a foodie at heart.

“I would go out to eat and it would seem crazy to me that the only way to give feedback was through a comment box or through some long receipts survey,” Zack Oates says on Digital Hospitality.

Surely he couldn’t be the only person who didn’t like receipt surveys.

“We found that over 90 percent of people hate receipt surveys,” laughs Zack Oates.

The more intimate reviews left on the likes of Yelp were not telling the entire story either.

“Data shows that you're three times more likely to leave a negative review than a positive one,” Zack points out.

Still, Zack was too smart to believe that customers are simply lazy or angry. After doing some digging, he realized the issue with reviews is the money it costs the restaurant to acquire feedback and the hoops that customers have to jump through to do so.

“Guest feedback has always been an expense,” Zack notes. “Why does it have to be an expense? Why can't we actually drive revenue through this? So that's really what our whole thesis is. We’re an actionable guest feedback company that actually drives revenue.”

With Ovation, customers are incentivized to give feedback and they’re able to do it through standard text messaging. Ovation allows restaurants to have these important conversations privately because, well, they should.

“You can't outsource your customer service to other people,” states Zack Oates. “They're your customers and you deserve to take care of that customer and they deserve to hear from you. Customers need to communicate on the channels that they feel comfortable communicating on.”

By making the customer comfortable, even when angry, you can come to a resolution and actually make good on your mistakes. Ovation allows this to happen in a fashion that’s timely and solution oriented.

“If you are in an emotional state, you want to tell someone right now,” Zack notes on human behavior. “Ovation allows customers to vent and vent privately to you. Now you get the information and you can make it right instantly. It's all text messages to the customers so they're not downloading an app. They take a question survey, tell us how it was and tell us more. If it was great, tell us more goes to Google, Yelp and Facebook. If it was bad,

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