which sites

  • Google, Tripadvisor and Trustpilot: collected automatically, or through the Companion where Earful asks.
  • Yelp: through the Companion when you open your Yelp page or Yelp for Business.
  • Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats: through the Companion, from your own partner dashboard. Delivery apps don’t offer a reviews API to anyone, so the Companion reads the reviews your dashboard already shows you.
  • OpenTable: through the Companion, from your restaurant dashboard.
  • DoorDash and Grubhub (US): the same, from the Merchant Portal and Grubhub for Restaurants.

The delivery and booking dashboards are new in Earful, and we’ve built them from each site’s help pages because we can’t sign in to your dashboard ourselves. If one doesn’t sync, Earful tells you on the Locations page and we hear about it too.

set it up

  1. Sign in to Earful with your email address. There’s no password; we send you a sign-in link.
  2. Add your restaurant as a location, then paste the link to each site’s page for it: your Google Maps listing, your Tripadvisor page, your Deliveroo or Just Eat menu page, and so on.
  3. Add the free Earful Companion to your browser and connect it from Settings.
  4. Open each partner dashboard once, signed in as you normally are. The Companion reads its reviews and sends them to Earful.
  5. If you like, tick Keep my signed-in dashboards synced in the Companion. It then checks each dashboard every 30 minutes while your browser is open, so alerts don’t wait for your next visit. If a site asks you to sign in again or to prove you’re human, the Companion stops and tells you; it never gets round a check.

replying, site by site

Edit the draft in Earful and press Copy and open reply page. The Companion fills your reply into the site’s own reply box, and you press submit. Each site has its own rules:

  • Deliveroo: replies go to the customer by email after Deliveroo checks them, and don’t show in the app. Deliveroo says customers who get a reply are 23% more likely to order again.
  • Just Eat: replies are public and appear within 48 hours, after a check.
  • Uber Eats: the customer sees your reply in the app. Reply soon; the window is short.
  • OpenTable: public replies can’t be edited afterwards and can’t include links, phone numbers or email addresses. Put contact details in a private reply.
  • DoorDash: private replies only, within 7 days of the review.
  • Google, Tripadvisor, Yelp: public replies, under the review.

On every site, don’t offer anything in return for changing a review, and don’t ask a customer to order elsewhere. Sites remove replies that do, and in the UK it can break consumer law.

alerts for the bad ones

Set an alert in Earful for two stars or fewer and pick the sites, and the kitchen or the floor manager hears about a cold delivery the same evening, in Slack or by email. One location covers all of a restaurant’s sites, so a group with five sites pays for five locations, not thirty profiles.

free tools to start with

Put a Google review QR code on the bill folder and the takeaway bag, and print the A5 card for the counter. When the reviews land, the free reply generator drafts an answer to any of them.