Dive Brief:

• Yelp has integrated with Toast and Reserve with Google, expanding its front-of-house product capabilities under Yelp Guest Manager, the company said Monday.
• Its partnership with Toast provides insights from the point-of-sale system, while Reserve with Google allows diners to reserve a table or join a waitlist with Yelp’s restaurant partners from Google Search and Maps. 
• These integrations come about a month after Yelp rolled out several product updates to enhance the restaurant discovery process and customer reviews.

Dive Insight:

While Yelp’s most recent product enhancements were more consumer-facing, these latest updates are meant to help improve front-of-house operations. Its integration with Toast allows restaurants to automate table status updates to help free up staff and combine front-of-house and point-of-sales data points to understand dining trends. The partnership also allows data integrations that help restaurants connect with the rest of their tech stack. Through the Reserve with Google integration, diners will be able to view the current wait times or reserve a table through Google Search and Maps. 

In addition to these integrations, Yelp enhanced its Yelp Guest Manager with several features, including credit card holds, advanced reservation planning, improved table and floor management and shift management improvements. Restaurants can now set credit card holds with policies for weekends, holidays or special events and set when and what customers are charged for no shows and late cancelations. For reservations, staff are able to search for upcoming reservations using a guest’s name and phone number, allowing for easier updates and edits. With Reservation Timeline, hosts can more easily plan for upcoming reservations and accommodate both walk-ins and reservations. 

Yelp’s new table suggestions feature allows staff to auto-assign reservations depending on party requirements, table size and availability. It also provides hosts warnings if there is a scheduling conflict to prevent overbooking, among other features for managers. The company said it added more functionality to its shift management tool, including “the ability to build weekly recurring schedules, create one-off shifts for special days and manage cover flow in advance to prepare for guests before their arrival.”

Integrations and product expansions are becoming increasingly common across the restaurant tech segment. Square previously partnered with OpenTable and Facebook to enhance its product features, while Toast added reservation and waitlist management tools last month.

Yelp’s product-led strategy, along with its local advertising platform, helped drive its first quarter results, Yelp CFO David Schwarzbach said during the company’s May earnings call. Net revenue rose 13% to $312 million, according to a letter to shareholders.

“One of the things that we’ve said many times is we believe that our product-led strategy will enable us to drive margin expansion over the long-term,” Schwarzbach said.