Whether you have a restaurant or pottery shop, customers will have questions regarding your business. And those answers are not going to be available on your site no matter how thorough you are. That is just a fact. The new Questions & Answers feature from Yelp (NYSE:YELP) gives your customers the answers they need about your business from actual customers or yourself.
New Yelp Questions and Answers Feature
This Q&A thread of a restaurant called Le Pigeon is a common example of the kind of unexpected questions customers may ask. But the answer provides details from a personal experience that may not be captured in an FAQ section of the site, if it has one.
Questions & Answers started as part of Yelp’s hackathon project , a two-day event where the company’s engineers can go wild creating innovative and out of the box whimsical and useful projects. The Q&A brings the platform’s 115 million engaged reviewers and business owners so customers can get their questions answered with real world experiences.
The best aspect of this Q&A is you will get multiple answers, even to questions you might’ve not thought of asking. A simple “How long do people stay?” question for the Kennedy Space Center resulted in seven answers, including one for VIP tours people may not be aware of.
Just like other social media platforms, on Yelp a question can be up-voted or down-voted depending on how helpful it was, and it can have multiple answers. And users can get notified when their questions or those of other members of the community get answered.
Yelp is adding more features to its platform, including analytics to give small businesses more tools to engage with their customers. These types of engagements provide invaluable data that will help you answer customer demand and be more proactive in introducing new products and services based on the conversations they are having about your company.
Questions & Answers is available in the U.S. on Android, iOS and desktop platforms.
Yelp Photo via Shutterstock
This article, “Yelp Q-and-A Solicits More Community Feedback for Your Brand” was first published on Small Business Trends