You all are probably very familiar with the popular review site Yelp by now. The concept is fairly simple: you visit a business and you write a review about your experience. You can also add “tips” and photos if you’d like.
But this experience is typically experienced only by the consumer, not the business owner. Well, what if it could go both ways?
Popular ride-sharing apps such as Lyft and Uber allow a two-way rating system: passengers leave ratings for their drivers, and drivers leave ratings for their passengers.
Wouldn’t that be great if all business owners could incorporate this into their business models? Well, one restaurant reservation system based out of Sydney is certainly intent on trying.
Dimmi ResDiary, Australia’s version of OpenTable, gives participating restaurants the ability to track and rate customers’ dining ‘performance’. Everything from what they ordered, how much they tipped right down to any over-the-top requests they may have made while dining is all included in a diner’s profile. This gives any servers working that day the opportunity to appropriately prepare themselves for what kind of day they might have ahead of them.
The hope is, “Diners will behave better, tip better, treat staff better. It will help improve the industry and may help the diner get that all-important upgrade next time,” says Dimmi CEO, Stevan Premutico.
With access to this platform, each of the 2,500 member restaurants has the ability to inform the community at large about you. Little details such as if you prefer a window seat, whether you typically order appetizers or just go straight for the entree, or even what you do for a living and whether you are attractive or not.
Of course, this is nothing short of what any restaurant owner could potentially find out about you by performing a simple Google search.
At Eleven Madison Park, this is something that maître d’ Justin Roller does on a day-to-day basis, according to Grubstreet. Not only that but, “I’m looking for chef’s whites and wine glasses,” he says, indicating that he’s especially on the lookout for undercover chefs and sommeliers.
But having a diner profile on the site will likely at least eliminate the margin of error when searching for a particular diner, even if just by a little bit.
This is not unlike the story we posted a few weeks ago about a taxi driver leaving mean, if not downright cruel, reviews of his passengers to his Twitter page.
So what do you think? Do you think you would be more inclined to behave better if you felt you were being ‘graded’ by your server? Or do you think you would be less inclined to a dine at a restaurant if you knew it was a participant in this program?
