CherryTop is a project that I challenged myself to do in order to develop my software skills.
I challenged myself to find an automatic way to promote restaurant reviews on Google & Google Maps and do it only by using low-code platforms.
- Successfully challenged myself to create an automatic way to promote restaurant reviews on Google & Google Maps using low-code platforms. Developed a dynamic smart form with QR codes to streamline the review process for customers and compensate waiters for their efforts.
- Identified the importance of reviews for restaurants in Google’s local business results, and devised a solution to make the reviewing process smooth and easy for customers, increasing the likelihood of positive reviews and improving the restaurant’s online presence.
- Addressed the challenge of obtaining reviews for restaurants by creating a unique system with individual QR codes for waiters, allowing for efficient review collection and providing valuable customer feedback to enhance service quality.
- Utilized strategic methodologies like VPC and BMC to identify potential clients, including restaurant managers, waiters, and restaurant clients, and designed tailored experiences for each user category.
- Successfully planned and executed the entire project, developing flows for customer interactions, restaurant manager activities, and waiter onboarding. Managed the data structure and warehousing for efficient data handling and statistics display on the manager’s app.
- Demonstrated proficiency in using Airtable, WordPress, Make.com (formerly Integromat), and Glide Apps as the primary tools for managing data, automating processes, and creating user-friendly app formats.
Why I started CherryTop
I started CherryTop when I was a hotel manager as a side project.
Being a hotel manager it’s not an easy task, but one of the benefits is that I had plenty of free time and was allowed to work on things that are not part of the hotel industry and I really wanted to acquire a new set of very valuable skills.
One day I went to a pizza place and saw that they have a QR code next to the cashier asking for reviews, I asked the owner about it and he showed me the traffic he gets from Google thanks the little reviews he already got and that amazed me.
Why getting reviews is so important for restaurants
Just after Covid-19 was over Google really pushed local business’s results on top of the classic organic results in a different form.
The new form was amazing and now just feels normal for us, it has pictures, pin location on the map, buttons for the website, directions, or calls.
Also, Google announced that reviews will be a big part of promoting for the first organic result. A good Google business profile can get a huge free reach for a very long time
The problem with getting reviews for restaurants
I understood that asking for reviews is the best way to get them, but leaving a review on the restaurant’s Google business profile is not a very easy task, it requires a few steps:
1. Searching the business (hopefully it will show on the first attempt)
2. Looking for the review tab – which is sometimes hidden
3. Leaving a review
it is a lot of effort and the waiters usually don’t have the time to explain it.
Also, it’s a big task for a waiter when he has a lot of other things to do.
In Professor Dan Ariely’s book “The Upside of Irrationality” he showed that people are willing to help only if it’s not requiring effort from them, which means if the reviewing will be smooth and easy there’s a bigger chance people will cooperate and help the waiter to get the review.
On the waiters’ side, they are at work, and their incentive to do extra work is money usually or another way like a present or gift card.
Someone already tried to solve this problem
One day I went to a pizza place and saw that they have a QR code next to the cashier asking for reviews, I asked the owner about it and he showed me the traffic he gets from Google of that and the numbers were very high and I could see the start of the solution.
QR is amazing for connecting the interaction from the physical world to the digital one, almost like a button you press to get to the landing page in a digital campaign, the only difference is that you need to scan it with your smartphone.
The solution I came up with
I thought if each waiter has a unique QR code to ask for reviews it will be easier to get more reviews in an active way and to compensate the waiters for their extra work.
The QR leads to a gate page with a dynamic smart form that asks 3 questions to understand the satisfaction of the customer. If his satisfied he will be sent to leave stars in the Google reviews, and if his not he’ll be sent to leave details to customer support.
That way I can know which waiter really worked hard to get a review and I could make a competition between them for getting the most reviews.
The strategy to start
I believe that before you go on a journey you need to plan it. So the first this I did is to think who might be my client, so I used a brilliant framework methodology called “Value Proposition Canvas” (VPC) and made a VPC for each player in this little game, the restaurant manager, the waiter, and the restaurant client.
After that made a “Business Model Canvas” (BMC) to better understand the process of the potential workflow of the whole thing.
And then created the flows that each kind of user in the system needs to experience.
The flows
The restaurant’s customer flows:
* The interaction between the restaurant’s customer with the waiter.
* The interaction of the customer on the gate page.
The restaurant’s manager flows:
* Registration and onboarding
* An App to see all the activities and how many reviews were collected
* Inviting waiters to the system
* Editing and managing the affiliation of each QR code for a selected waiter
The waiter flows:
* Onboarding
* A comfortable tag that will be comfortable to work with to show the QR Code
The data logic
After the flows of each were clear to me I needed to plan the data structure to make it work.
To be honest, that was the most challenging part for me that I had to learn about it a lot but I succeed it.
I’ve developed the data structure with all the affiliations inside of it and also developed warehousing for the statistics that will be shown on the manager’s app.
The tools I’ve used
The 4 main tools that I have used are:
Airtable – An visual tool to manage data tables and the linking between tables. It can integrate with all the other tools with an API.
WordPress – I’ve been using WordPress for a very long time and it’s the easiest for me to customize it for my needs, mainly collecting information, including the dynamic gate page, or editing existing information like waiter contact details.
Make.com (formally Integromat) – An powerful automation tool to create complex scenarios. Used it to connect and move data between the tools check authorization for changes and auto-update the live data to the archives for the statistics.
Glide Apps – A platform that connects easily to Airtable’s data tables and helps to show the relevant data to the user in an app format.
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