Yelp has announced a new program called “Yelp Knowledge,” which expands the group of third party companies that are able to directly access its complete reviews data. It was earlier this year that the company provided its full database to Sprinklr. Yelp identified today the additional partners to gain access: Medallia, Reputology and Revinate.
The idea behind Yelp Knowledge is that through this data, multi-location brands and franchises aren’t going to just simply see reviews, but gain a more holistic sense of how their locations are performing, as well as how customer sentiment is trending. Yep has positioned this program to be a “social analytics” program, and not just as a “reputation management” one. This could help yield some really great operational insights for those businesses.
Despite many analytics/reputation companies are able to monitor Yelp reviews, the company said in a blog post,“Only Yelp Knowledge partners have verified, current data and a direct line to Yelp to make sure their clients are getting trustworthy data.”
With this program, Yelp is seeing this data being used along side other social media channels like Twitter and Facebook. The idea is to help brands better understand their customers’ feedback about individual locations and stores. Before, it wasn’t indicated by Yelp on whether or not it was getting any license fees as part of the program. If there are any fees, they’re not very significant.
For Yelp, the program is a way to help expose the value of its content and reviews to brands. The company hopes that it’ll become more engaged on the site, such as with responding to reviews and adding content. There was an earlier blog post that announced the initial integration with Sprinklr. Yelp had this to say in that post:
For businesses who want to join the conversation with their customers and engage with them directly, we recommend claiming your Yelp pages, responding to reviews and adding photos and business information. Whether you’ve got one location or many, get started at biz.yelp.com.