Reviews and the night behind them

A public review tells you what a guest felt. Your own service data tells you why. The review inbox joins the two: every ingested review is matched to the visit it describes, so a two-star "we waited forever between courses" sits next to the table's actual course timeline — seated 7:02, order taken 7:41, first course 8:35.

The review inbox is a beta — ask us to switch it on for your organization.

Getting reviews in

Four ways:

• Connect Google — link your Google Business Profile from the reviews page, pick the location, and TableStack pulls your public reviews in daily (or on demand with Sync now). Re-syncs update in place, never duplicate. (Available once the platform's Google credentials are live.)
• Add review — type one in from any source.
• Import CSV — a file with author, rating, date and an optional body column. Broken rows are skipped and counted, never fatal. Uploads are capped at 2 MB and 5,000 rows per file — split anything bigger.
• The API — integrators push reviews to POST /api/v1/venues/{venue}/reviews. Rows carrying an external_id update in place on re-push, so a sync can run repeatedly without duplicates.

Matching reviews to visits

The matcher looks at departed visits in the week before the review and compares the reviewer's name against the party's guests:

• An exact name match with a single candidate links automatically.
• A partial match ("M. Henderson") is only suggested — a human confirms or dismisses it, and that decision is final. Same philosophy as guest dedupe: never a silent merge.

A confirmed match shows the guest, the table, and the visit's service trail from the audit log — so you can see whether the kitchen really did run 25 minutes behind.

Low ratings ring the bell

A fresh 1-2★ review raises a guest alert so managers hear about a bad night while it's still recoverable — and where the review matched a guest, you know exactly who to call.

What this affects

• Guest alerts — low ratings arrive at the same bell as VIP activity.
• The guest book — a matched review links to the guest's profile.

What affects this

• The visit lifecycle — the service trail is only as good as the course statuses your team records.
• Private feedback stays separate — surveys you collect yourself are first-party and never mixed into the public review book.