A Bar Owner's Guide to Getting More Guest Reviews Today

 Is your bar missing out on dozens of positive reviews every week?

Most bar owners struggle to get consistent reviews, despite having hundreds of happy guests each week. 

In today's episode: 

• Learn the exact moment to ask for reviews 
• Master a non-pushy approach that works 
• Discover how to make review collection automatic 

Listen now to transform your online reputation with this simple, proven strategy. 

Learn More:
Email Chris
Schedule a Strategy Session
Bar Business Nation Facebook Group
The Bar Business Podcast Website
Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'

Thank you to our show sponsors, SpotOn and Starfish. SpotOn's modern, cloud-based POS system allows bars to increase team productivity and provides the reporting you need to make smart financial decisions. Starfish works with your bookkeeping software using AI to help you make data-driven decisions and maximize your profits while giving you benchmarking data to understand how you compare to the industry at large.
**We are a SpotOn affiliate and earn commissions from the link above.

A podcast for bar, pub, tavern, nightclub, and restaurant owners, managers, and hospitality professionals, covering essential topics like bar inventory, marketing strategies, restaurant financials, and hospitality profits to help increase b...

Transcript

Chris Schneider (00:01.048)
Today, discover the reason why guests don't leave reviews, learn one proven method that doubles your review rates, and...

master how to implement this strategy without being pushy.

Today we're exploring a simple yet powerful technique to increase your online reviews that you can implement immediately. This method has helped some bars double their review rates without compromising guest experience or staff time. Now when we think about online reviews, it's always a love-hate, right? And it's a love-hate both with the reviews themselves and with the platforms because we can have a long conversation about how much we love and hate Yelp or love and hate Google reviews and how they don't always benefit

the bar in how their standards are, in how they enforce things. But the bottom line here is you have good reviews and you have bad reviews. And the best way to get rid of bad reviews is to have more good reviews. Right? Fundamentally, if you want your star rating to go up and your 3.9 on Google, you need a lot of four and a half and five star reviews to get you to 4.2, 4.3.

And so the big thing to understand is most guests never even consider leaving a review. Most people do not think about leaving reviews. And I will admit, I talk about this stuff on here. I talk about ways to get reviews with clients. I talk to servers and bartenders of clients that I have and tell them what a great job they're doing in getting reviews. But I don't leave them. I don't know why. I just don't. It's never been a thing I do. I don't

Chris Schneider (01:46.094)
leave reviews online. And every once in a long while, if somebody asked me, I'll do it. But unless I get asked, I'm not doing it. So most of your guests are never thinking about leaving review. And because they're not thinking about it, they're not going to do it unless someone asks them. Well, most of your teams are hesitant to ask for review. A, it seems kind of pushy. B, it seems a little underhanded. You know, we can even talk about the fact that Google and people say, well, you really shouldn't solicit reviews. This should be people leave them.

But we all know they won't leave them unless you say, hey, do you leave a review? So it can be difficult to do.

And it's reasonable for staff to be hesitant because people can take it the wrong way, right? Like I just said. So how we time when we ask for reviews is absolutely critical. So the first thing about getting more guest reviews is finding the perfect moment. And essentially, you have to train your servers to do this. There's no way that you can do this unless you're the person waiting on the table or waiting on the guest at the bar.

Because the first thing we need to do is identify a natural high point in the guest experience. What did that guest say or do that makes you realize, hey, this is a high point in their experience, and I can push them a little bit here to potentially give us a good review. Now, the biggest indicator of that is going to be when the guest gives you positive verbal feedback. If you get positive verbal feedback from someone, it's really easy to say,

Yeah, I would really appreciate it. Thank you so much, but I'd really appreciate if you also put that on Google. Or also put that on Yelp. The other thing that you can always look for is social media activity during a visit. So if you see a guest who is we've talked about this a lot. All your food, all your drink should be Instagrammable. They get your plate of food, they get a drink, they take a picture of it, they're posting it on Instagram.

Chris Schneider (03:47.17)
Hey, while you're on Instagram, make sure to like, follow, and leave a review or follow us and leave a review or like us and leave a review. However you want to phrase that. But the same way at the end of every podcast episode, I say, hey, make sure you like, follow, leave a review, like, subscribe, leave a review. You should be doing that when you see your guests on social media because you know they're right there with the phone in their hand and it's not that many more steps for them.

Chris Schneider (04:15.916)
And the other key thing that you can look for here is repeat visitor enthusiasm. So if you have somebody come in and then they come in again and they're really excited about being there and they come in and they're going to be really excited about being there, you can ask them, have you left us a review online? Do you want to? And so once we've identified that perfect moment, whether it's through a high point in the guest experience that we know is going on, we've actually received verbal feedback from the guest and we know they're ready to leave a positive review because of that.

We see that they're on social media or we see that they're enthusiastically coming back time and time again. We got to make our move. And what is our move? It's to make an ask. It's to ask them to do it.

And so that example I gave earlier when I said, if somebody gives you great verbal feedback, say, hey, that's wonderful. Thank you so much. Could you also put that on Google? It helps us out a lot. That is just building a bridge between the conversation you're already having with the guest, the normal interaction you're already having, and the request to post something online. The big thing here is every time you request something, it should seem casual and authentic. It shouldn't seem like it's some scripted, well, I appreciate that you've given us positive feedback.

please make sure to leave us a guest review on Google. Something like that just sounds like bullshit, right? It should not be scripted in that way. But you can teach your team how to do this, and every person is going to come across it a little bit differently and phrase things a little bit differently. But make sure that whenever you ask, whenever you're bridging that conversation from something the guest said or did to can you please leave us a review, make sure that process is simple and easy and that you're very authentic about how you're doing it. You want your team to have

clear, simple instructions to give the guest.

Chris Schneider (06:03.502)
So not only do we need to train the team on here's how you identify the perfect time, here's how you do the bridge, but also here's exactly what's tell the guests to make their life easy to leave a review.

Now, a few other things that you can do here. QR codes make it a lot easier for your staff to give people clear, simple instructions. So you can use QR codes on a table tent or in your check presenters to help facilitate that guest interaction. Of course, you should be monitoring your review platforms daily. So if you're monitoring your review platforms daily, you should know when new reviews come in. You should see who's getting those reviews.

And then like anything else that happens in your bar, if you see that you have one team member who is absolutely killing it, figure out what they're doing and then implement that across your entire team. When you have success, figure out why, double down on that success. From the management end, the other thing that you need to be doing on reviews, and we've talked about this before, we will talk about this again, always respond to your reviews promptly. So you get all these reviews flowing in. That's half of it.

Half of it is getting that customer to write the review. The second half is making sure you respond to that review. That shows that you're engaged as a bar. That shows that you care about your customers. That shows that you want to deliver the best guest experience and that you care what people say. You care what people think. You want to interact with your guests in that way. So make sure you always respond to every review.

And most importantly, track your success rates. You have to monitor your review performance. You have to monitor how many reviews you're getting, track how well it's working. And like I said, where you see wins, figure out why and double down on those wins. So to wrap us up for today, remember the key to getting more reviews is not about asking everyone. It's about asking the right guest at the right time in the right way. If you start implementing a simple strategy of identify the perfect moment,

Chris Schneider (08:07.086)
create an authentic ask and then follow through. You'll see your review numbers grow naturally and consistently. And hopefully at the same time, you'll see the ratings for your bar increase.