Yelp has announced the launch of a new feature: Yelp Connect, which enables users to go beyond customers reviews and see “what the restaurants have to say for themselves.”
According to Devon Wright, Yelp’s general manager of restaurant marketplaces, with Yelp Connect, restaurants will be able to post updates about things like recent additions to the menu, happy hour specials and upcoming events. These updates are then shown on the Yelp homepage (which is already becoming more personalized), in a weekly email and on the restaurant’s profile page.
Consumers, meanwhile, can follow restaurants to see these updates, but Yelp also shows them to users who have indicated interest in a restaurant by making a reservation, joining its waitlist or bookmarking its profile.
Wright says that Yelp allows them to reach “a high-intent audience — people who are not just browsing for updates from their friends but are actually looking to go out for a meal.”
Guang Yang, the Group Product Manager for Yelp Reservations and Waitlist, also notes that restaurants can set end dates for their Yelp posts, which could make them more comfortable sharing things like limited-time menus.
Wright describes this as part of a broader evolution for Yelp, where “you don’t just want to discover a great restaurant; you want to transact with that restaurant.” To realize this, the company has added features like reservations, with Connect serving as “the final piece of that journey,” allowing restaurants to continue reaching out to consumers after their visit.
In addition to launching Connect, Yelp has also announced an enhancement to its Waitlist feature, which allows consumers to see the current estimated wait time at a restaurant, and to join the queue directly from the Yelp app.
Yang says that Yelp can now use real wait time data from a restaurant to predict the average wait at a given time — so if you want to get dinner at 7 pm, Yelp can tell how long you will probably have to wait.
Yelp is also using these predictions to power an additional feature called Notify Me. If you want to get seated at a certain restaurant at a certain time, you can hit a button to get a notification that will prompt you to join the waitlist at the right time — if you want to eat at 7 pm, and the average wait time at 7 pm is an hour, then you will get a notification at 6 pm.
However, the company acknowledges that there will be times when the actual time is different from what is predicted, which may be challenging for customers in some Friday night hang-out or dinner-date contexts. Yang has stated that the company is working hard in enhancing this feature.