How Yelp is offering AI to provide brands more CX help
Choose a restaurant or business category. Comb through the reviews. Decide which one you’ll take a chance on. Click the button that lets you navigate to the company’s website.
This has been the typical customer journey for people who use Yelp up until now.
With the introduction of new AI-powered services this week, however, Yelp has the potential to be involved more directly in customer interactions and serve as an extension of the experience companies deliver.
Beyond the AI tools you might expect – like an assistant to answer questions about a business – Yelp launched Yelp Host, Yelp Receptionist and RepairPal appointment scheduling.
The host (and receptionist) with the most?
These capabilities take Yelp far beyond a platform where consumers passively read reviews. It could make Yelp a conduit for managing critical moments that tend to inform those reviews.
Yelp Receptionist, for instance, provides the AI equivalent of a frontline admin person to field customer inquiries and set up appointments. Yelp Host would do the same thing for restaurants, taking reservations and special requests such as where diners prefer to sit.
In both cases, Yelp said its tools will ask “intelligent follow-up questions, take and summarize messages, manage reservations and leads, (and) transfer callers when needed.”
You can customize everything from the name of your receptionist or host to what it says and train it on pricing and cancellation policies.
RepairPal, meanwhile, is focused more narrowly on auto dealerships to streamline vehicle maintenance. It will also provide “AI-organized before and after photos, and response quality badges, make hiring a professional easier than ever before.”
This could be a boon for small businesses and restaurants, many of which have websites that look like they haven’t been updated since the 1990s and can make it difficult to contact a human being.
The friction Yelp is trying to remove
While Yelp’s earlier moves, such as introducing video comments, focused on the experience of those contributing to its reviews, these latest capabilities reduce friction for its visitors and listed businesses alike.
Instead of navigating away from Yelp, its AI tools will move customers from the “discovery” and “consideration” phase to something akin to purchasing a product on a brand’s Amazon web store.
If enough businesses and customers use it, Yelp could wind up setting the bar for strong CX in areas like booking appointments and reservations.
On the flip side, consumers may not immediately realize Yelp’s role if an experience goes awry. If Yelp Host or Yelp Receptionist get your booking wrong, for instance, who gets the heat in the review you leave on Yelp afterwards – the brand, or the platform itself?
It’s also hard to imagine most businesses taking full advantage of the customization options Yelp is giving them. For many small businesses, it will simply be a way to avoid the chore of hiring or allocating staff to these tasks.
AI has already forced many brands to ask themselves whether responding to customers’ initial outreach requires a high-touch experience, or whether AI could do the job better.
Now they have to ask themselves whether they want to deploy the technology on their own, or outsource it to a third party where customers are already flocking.To put it another way, do they want to help themselves – or Yelp themselves?
