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Tech Talk: Manage Your Digital Doorways

Editor's note: Restaurant Startup & Growth and RestaurantOwner.com do not engage in pay-to-play editorial. Marqii is not an advertiser, nor does the company actively promote our media, to our knowledge. That said, we care about what our readers and members are using. In this case, Shawn Walchef of Cali BBQ, a reader, member, and contributor to our media.
Walchef considers Marqii, along with this magazine and RestaurantOwner.com and Restaurant Solutions, Inc., an important part of his toolbox for success. In this installment, Walchef explains how Marqii fixed a pain point at his Cali BBQ restaurant by unlocking the ability to quickly and easily update their more than 80 restaurant listings online.

Your restaurant doesn't just a have a physical entrance -- it also has digital doors. Each online place a guest can interact with - and order from - your business is a doorway to your brand.

Marqii's automated menu and review management software helps businesses maintain better control of their many online locations

That's a ton of doors. So many doors that you can't possibly staff them all.

For a hospitality business, this is a pain point in need of a solution. What do you do when the Internet has created so many different entrances to your business, each requiring regular maintenance and care?

Fixing a Pain Point

We discovered this growing problem six years ago at Cali BBQ in San Diego. Our staff started getting more and more phone calls about incorrect menu items on random websites that we never set up. This became a time-consuming headache. The Internet has many places with potentially uncorrected information about you and your business. And more of these listing websites keep being created every year.

As somebody who hosts a Digital Hospitality podcast, and eats, breathes and lives everything digital, it is still incredibly difficult (or near impossible) to manually update all of our more than 80 active restaurant location listings online.

That type of manual data entry can now be better controlled using an automated process with Marqii.

Before we started using a menu management system, our restaurant managers used to have to log in to many dozens of websites, taking many hours of tedious work, just to update a piece of information about our business, such as a link, a photo, or a menu item.

"It's easy to miss stuff when you have to log in to different websites," Cali BBQ General Manager Eric Olafsen says.

Marqii helps us with management of online menus and online reputation, both of which in turn allow us to show up more in local searches, like when people type "Barbecue Near Me" into a search engine and we pop up on page one of the results.

All you have to do is add or edit information and the system automatically pushes that change platforms on which you want to be active.

Before signing up for Marqii, we used SinglePlatform (owned by TripAdvisor), a similar SaaS platform for managing business listings.

Cost and Services

The Marqii Base service costs $74.99 per location. It gives the ability to update menus and location data on more than 75 different listings from one simple dashboard. That way, when people are searching for your "food near me" on Google, they are finding up-to-date, accurate information about your business.

Now that we subscribe to Marqii's Professional service ($119.99/month), our staff can quickly and easily update all of our published location information, and also has the power to monitor and respond to online feedback on Yelp and other review websites. That's an important feature for us at Cali BBQ because engaging with our customers and responding to their concerns and compliments is a core pillar of our business.

Most of the reviews Cali BBQ receives online are made on three places: Yelp, Facebook and Google. Marqii combines the flow of reviews from all three of those websites into one place which our staff can use to respond to and monitor feedback.

When your hours change, or you have 86'ed a menu item, you want to make sure all the online places your guests can buy from you are correct. And when someone has a legitimate gripe, you want to be able to listen and respond to it as soon as possible.

Marqii was founded in 2016. The CEO is Avi Goren. Its headquarters are in the Greater New York Area.

Can you recommend a technology that's helped your restaurant?

Email Shawn Walchef at [email protected] to start a conversation.

Keep Learning…

You can schedule a Marqii demo at: https://www.marqii.com to get a closer look at the services they offer and ask any questions.
Follow them on social media: @getmarqii, Email Marqii: [email protected]