Transcript: Episode 189: Sneaky Server Bonus

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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor episode 189. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/189. 

[00:00:14] Narrator: Welcome to Top Floor with Susan Barry. This weekly podcast ride up to the top floor features tangible tips and excellent stories from the experts and characters who elevate hospitality. And now your host and elevator operator, Susan Barry.

[00:00:32] Susan Barry: Welcome to the show. Adrian Balcan is the founder of Feed Check, a data-driven platform that helps hospitality businesses monitor and analyze customer reviews. With a background in both economics and computer science, Adrian started the company right after graduating from university, initially focusing on product reviews for smart devices. He later pivoted the business to focus on restaurants, bakeries, and other hospitality companies nearby. Today, we are going to talk about how AI is transforming customer feedback and hospitality, the importance of data-driven decision making, and what businesses can learn from online reviews. But before we jump in, we need to answer the call button. 

Call button rings 

The emergency call button is our hotline for hospitality professionals who have burning questions. If you would like to submit a question, you can call or text me at 850-404-9630. Today's question was submitted by Sunny and Adrian, here is Sunny's question, is there an easy way to tell if hotel reviews are real or fake? What do you think? Is there a way that you can tell that's simple or do you have to apply a complicated algorithm to figure it out? 

[00:02:08] Adrian Balcan: Yeah. First of all, thank you for having me here. And regarding the fake reviews, it's not an easy way. In some cases you can spot a fake review based on very short answer, like, fantastic, great experience without any details about the experience, about the rooms, about the cleaning, about the stuff, and so on. This may be let's say something like a clue. 

[00:02:43] Susan Barry: Mm-hmm. 

[00:02:43] Adrian Balcan: But even in these cases, you can't be sure that it’s a fake review. 

[00:02:50] Susan Barry: It's true because I would write a short review like that, like, it was great, thanks, bye.  

[00:02:56] Adrian Balcan: What you can do here is compare with the negative reviews. If all the postive reviews are short text and all the negative ones or medium are long text there is a problem. 

[00:03:11] Susan Barry: Mm, that's a good tip. That's good to know. I think that hoteliers always think that the negative reviews are fake and customers always think that the positive reviews are fake. So that's a good tip for how to do a little personal analysis. So you founded Feed Check right after graduation. What inspired you to take that leap into entrepreneurship instead of taking a more traditional job? 

[00:03:41] Adrian Balcan: Since I was a child, I was passionate about the computers and I consider myself a creative person and I have a lot of ideas and the entrepreneurship way give me the freedom to try these ideas. And this was the reason behind, I had a lot of ideas but I was started and I expected time to implement it.

[00:04:11] Susan Barry: So do you think it's, do you find it hard to stop yourself from going in a million different directions? Because that has been my entrepreneurial journey. I have a lot of ideas and I want to do all of them instead of focusing and building one business. What about you? 

[00:04:29] Adrian Balcan: Yeah. I think this is called divergent thinking, so.

[00:04:36] Susan Barry: It's true.

[00:04:36] Adrian Balcan: I also, I am a divergent thinker and my colleagues succeed to keep me on the right track. 

[00:04:46] Susan Barry: Excellent. Feed Check originally was focused on product reviews for like smart devices, I think phones, chargers, stuff like that. What made you decide to get out of that arena and move or pivot into hospitality? 

[00:05:05] Adrian Balcan: There are two reasons. One of, the first reason is because the product companies are very few companies and are located, most of them, in United States and China, and it's very hard to make sales to them. And the other reason is the long change cycle. If I discover an insight in a product review, the changing last two years because distribution chain, factories and so on.

[00:05:41] Susan Barry: Well, they've already made most of the things, and they're on the shelves, so it's not like they are gonna run around and pull them back off the shelves to fix something right?

[00:05:50] Adrian Balcan: Exactly, exactly. But on the other hand, in the hospitality and the business services area, just if I look on my street, I see three restaurants and there is very easy to improve something if someone tells about specific food that is not so good, you can adapt the recipe.  

[00:06:13] Susan Barry: That makes a lot of sense. Did you ever work in a hospitality business? Like were you ever a waiter or a dishwasher or anything like that?

[00:06:21] Adrian Balcan: Uh, no. No.

[00:06:22] Susan Barry: No? Okay, good. You have a background in both economics and computer science, which is a pretty common pairing for tech startups. How do you think that combination influences the way that you run your business?

[00:06:40] Adrian Balcan: Oh, there are some days, when I’m with the head in the Excel files and I discuss with colleagues, the business models and a lot of things like this. And there are other days when I want to discuss about engineering, how to code the specific functionality.

[00:06:59] Susan Barry: Mm-hmm

[00:07:00] Adrian Balcan: How to put the bottom and so on.

[00:07:04] Susan Barry: So I, if you could only do one, you have to pick between the two, what would it be?

[00:07:07] Adrian Balcan: Oh, it's hard because I am motivated by financial results, but my creativity is more, let's say in the engineering part.

[00:07:20] Susan Barry: Interesting.

[00:07:20] Adrian Balcan: It's very hard to respond to this.

[00:07:22] Susan Barry: I understand. I very much understand. How, can you explain how feed check works just overall and how it helps hospitality businesses manage their online reviews?

[00:07:37] Adrian Balcan: Yeah. First of all, we collect customer reviews from the main location and for our own locations. And after this we collected data for the competitor locations. This is called, we call this foundation, after we have all the data in same place. We have a lot of analytics can make comparisons between our own location and competitor ones where we can measure different aspects like how happy our customers are with cleaning, how happy they are with staff and so on. And we can measure each aspects and compare between our own location or compared with competitors, nearby competitors and so on.  

[00:08:27] Susan Barry: How do the competitors get selected? Is it based on geography or does your customer tell you, these are my five competitors that I wanna track? 

[00:08:38] Adrian Balcan: Both ways are available, but we recommend to use nearby competitors. 

[00:08:47] Susan Barry: Got it. So you collect all of the reviews and analyze the reviews, and then what happens when the business gets that information? What do they do with it? 

[00:08:59] Adrian Balcan: Usually they make an evaluation of at one week or two weeks and keep track of every location, of every aspect. If they discover a problem with one aspect, they try to find a specific review talking about this or the server in a restaurant that was responsible with the tissue and so on.

[00:09:25] Susan Barry: So what impact does that have, like do customer reviews really make a difference when it comes to how successful the business is or how much money they make? 

[00:09:36] Adrian Balcan: Yes. Yes. In this area, I think more than 80% of people are influenced by a review before making a booking.

[00:09:50] Susan Barry: Interesting.

[00:09:51] Adrian Balcan I, uh, say this for the first reservation, if they have a recommendation or for a previous experience it’s very important.

[00:10:07] Susan Barry: I know that responding to reviews is one of the services that Feed check offers. How does that work? How do you use feed check to respond to reviews for say, your restaurant down the street? 

[00:10:23] Adrian Balcan: First of all, we scan reviews every every day. And we send notifications when bad reviews comes.

[00:10:33] Susan Barry: Only for bad ones?

[00:10:34] Adrian Balcan: No, we can, we can send for, for all, but, uh, you don't wanna be spent with.

[00:10:40] Susan Barry: Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

[00:10:42] Adrian Balcan: And the negative ones are priority, let's say.

[00:10:48] Susan Barry:Understood.

[00:10:49] Adrian Balcan: Yeah. And if you respond to a negative review, the negative impact of that review is softened. Because the customer saw, okay, it's a bad review, but the brand, it's aware of it and responded and they care about it. 

[00:11:08] Susan Barry: I think that's absolutely true. The response to a review is like the commercial for the next guest. And I would evaluate almost entirely based on those responses versus the reviews themselves. But one thing that I see pretty often is that hotels or restaurants or whatever the business is, has have a tendency to do this, like copy and paste response. Thank you so much for your kind words. We were disappointed to learn that blah, blah, blah. Like it always is the same boring thing. Is there a way with the the Feed Check review response process that you can avoid that copy and paste thing? Like I feel like maybe if there's AI, it might sound copy and paste, or is that taken care of? 

[00:12:07] Adrian Balcan: We have an AI integration to respond to reviews, and every response proposed by AI is based on the review itself, so they are not copy and paste. It’s also based on the tone of the brand. Of course after thisthe people behind have ability to edit this this response. 

[00:12:35] Susan Barry: Got it. We like to make sure that our listeners come away from every episode of Top Floor with a couple of very practical and tangible tips to try either in their businesses or their day-to-day lives. So Adrian, if a business is overwhelmed by negative reviews, what's the first thing they should do? 

[00:12:57] Adrian Balcan: The first thing they should do is to respond to the negative ones, starting with the most recent because as I mentioned earlier, a response may soften the negative impact of the review. After this, they can look to the nearby competitors. To their reviews and see what is good, what is bad, and of course, improve what, what is bad in the current business. 

[00:13:30] Susan Barry: Oh, that's a good idea to look at the competitors. So what you're saying is kind of identify their strengths and weaknesses and maybe make a strategy accordingly.

[00:13:42] Adrian Balcan: You can get the points where you are top, and you can use this in marketing, in your messaging, especially the aspects where you are up and your competitors are down. These are very useful in marketing. And on the other side, the negative aspects, at your business compared with the competitors, there are opportunities to improve the quality of the business.

[00:14:15] Susan Barry: So for smaller businesses that don't have this kind of AI driven review management like you can get with Feed Check, what are some of the simple steps that they can take to improve their presence online? 

[00:14:32] Adrian Balcan: In terms of online reputation, the first step I would do is to make an Excel file, let's say with my location and five, top competitors or nearby competitors and to set up a procedure or a regular meeting, two weeks, every two weeks, in order to check how things changed. For my location and for competitors, so on. And when I see a significant change, I will go there and I will check the last reviews and I will try to identify the reason.

[00:15:15] Susan Barry: We have reached the fortune telling portion of our show. So now is the time to predict the future, and then we'll come back and see if you got it right. What is a prediction that you have about the future of artificial intelligence and hospitality?

[00:15:33] Adrian Balcan: Artificial intelligence in hospitality. I think in this area of customer feedback, the channels will change. For us it's easy to write and read text reviews, but for new generations, they use another format, video format, on Youtube, on TikTok and so on. So the format will be changed. And the other thing that will, I think will be changed is the way how we are buying or how we are booking this type of experience. For example, in my case, I select a destination and I search for specific hotels in that area. In the future I think, this will be in reverse order. I'll see maybe a video on TikTok, on YouTube about an amazing experience in some specific location. And I'll make my plans after this.

[00:16:44] Susan Barry: Oh, that's interesting. So it's sort of like my husband and I have been talking about this recently that we're seeing a lot more, for lack of a better word, Instagram like bars or bakeries or cafes in the different destinations that we go to where people are willing to wait in these incredibly long lines because whatever the thing is has gone viral on Instagram, and so it's the, they're willing to wait for the experience.

[00:17:18] Adrian Balcan: Exactly.

[00:17:19] Susan Barry: If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about how businesses handle customer feedback, what would it be? You can't say, use your software. 

[00:17:33] Adrian Balcan: Okay. Okay, this year in January, I was at CES in Las Vegas, a consumer electronic show. And I discovered there that a lot of brands are not managing their customer reviews. And I ask about this and they told me, oh, this is a job of our distributors. Okay, but distributor are not taking care enough of your brand. People are talking about your brand. If you put this in hands of distributors, it's not a good idea because people are talking about you, not about distributors. So, I will do something to have more implication in this in this customer reviews. 

[00:18:28] Susan Barry: That makes a lot of sense. Okay, folks, before we tell Adrian goodbye, we are going to head down to loading dock where all of the best stories get told

Elevator voice announces, “Going down.”

[00:18:43] Susan Barry: Adrian, what is a story you would only tell on the loading dock? 

[00:18:49] Adrian Balcan: It’s a story from last summer, one of our customers called very angry because they have an internal discussion and something like this, and they discover a difference between numbers from our application and numbers that someone tracked internally. And before going further, I need to mention that these these customers, this customer track and offer awards to servers based on the customer reviews.

[00:19:34] Susan Barry: Got it.

[00:19:35] Adrian Balcan: And of course, I put a lot of questions. When this issue appeared, which locations and so on. And of course we started an investigation internally and what we discovered is that a server of them requested a lot of reviews, to his friends every month again in order to have a bonus. And of course I called back and I told them about the situation and they were like, ah, okay. I dunno what happened further with the server. But yeah, because we don't count again, the same reviews. 

[00:20:28] Susan Barry: It happens. And you know that's funny, when we were talking earlier about how can you tell if reviews are real or fake, I forgot about that one, which is that if the business incentivizes someone to have their name mentioned, that person very often can have friends and family help win that contest for sure. Adrian Balcan, thank you so much for being here. I know our listeners got some great tips and I really appreciate you riding with us to the top floor. 

[00:21:00] Adrian Balcan: Thank you, Susan.

[00:21:00] Susan Barry: Thank you for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/189. Jonathan Albano is our editor, producer, and all around genius. He even wrote and performed our theme song with vocals by Cameron Albano. You can subscribe to Top Floor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. And your rating or review will go a long way in helping us give you more of what you like.

[00:21:38] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Top Floor Podcast at www.topfloorpodcast.com. Have a hospitality marketing question? Reach us at 850-404-9630 to be featured in a future episode.