The Customer Experience Blueprint: How Service Excellence Drives Revenue Growth

Most bar owners focus so hard on pricing and promotions, they miss the real reason customers come back or don’t. 

It’s not always about the money. 

It’s how people feel when they walk in, order a drink, and interact with your team.

 📌  What You’ll Learn 📌 

 🌟 Why service gaps kill repeat business
 🌟 How to map the full guest journey
 🌟 The one ratio your marketing hinges on
 🌟 What your reviews really reveal
 🌟 How two minutes shape first impressions
 🌟 Why complaints can build loyalty
 🌟 What true service culture looks like 

You’ll learn how to figure out when a guest becomes profitable, how to shorten that window, and the one ratio that makes or breaks your marketing strategy. 

If your goal is to stop wasting money and start growing on purpose, this one’s worth your time. 

🔴 Learn More: 🔴

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Thank you to our show sponsors, SpotOn and Profit Assist. SpotOn's modern, cloud-based POS system allows bars to increase team productivity and provides the reporting you need to make smart financial decisions. Profit Assist 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.

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Transcript

Chris Schneider 00:00  
Did you know 64% of full service customers say that the dining experience is more important than the price they pay for that experience? And that's according to the 2025 state of the Restaurant Industry report by the National Restaurant Association. So today we're going to talk about service experience versus price as a primary decision factor. And what you'll get by the end of this episode is a systematic approach to transform your bar revenue through customer experience. Hello, and welcome to the Bar Business Podcast, where we help bar owners increase profits, attract loyal guests, and simplify operations so you can avoid burnout and finally enjoy your life outside of your bar. I'm your host, Chris Schneider, the bar business coach. Before we get started, a quick thank you to our sponsors, Spot On, who provide a great modern POS solution for the bar and restaurant industry in starfish. To use AI to turn your books into actionable steps to increase profits. Today we're talking all about customer experience and we've talked a lot about financial pieces. And obviously, you know, I do finances.

Chris Schneider 01:04  
Finances are very important to me. I think that financial management is key to operating a profitable business, right. If you're not paying attention to money, you're probably not going to be profitable. But I think sometimes we can overlook the impact customer experience has on our profits. So today we're not going to talk about money. We're not going to talk finances. We're going to talk about customer experience and how you can use that to drive your profits forward. Now let's talk about a current market reality, because when you really think about this post-pandemic, in the last five years, we've seen a huge shift in customer expectations. And what customers want now when they go out is a better experience. I think pre-COVID we got away with sometimes not having the best experience because people were more interested in going out. Let's face it, during Covid, people stay at home and they didn't spend money and that was okay with them and they learned to spend less. Now we have definitely seen some bounce back, but we've also seen some pullback on that bounce back.

Chris Schneider 02:05  
But here's the thing you have to keep in mind. These are the problems that we're trying to solve today. Inconsistent service delivery. So if we don't give people a great experience they're not going to come back. And overall the hospitality industry retention rates is only about 55%. And you've heard me say this many times, but we need to aim for a retention rate of about 80%. We want 80% of our guests at any given time to be returning customers. And when that doesn't happen, we're missing revenue opportunities. We're having to spend a lot more money on our marketing and advertising. And in general, we're not going to be as successful as we otherwise would be. So the solution to this problem is systematic customer experience blueprint to understand what that customer experience looks like. And we've talked about this a number of times. And I have to give credit to Dave Neitzel because he and Dave Wolski, who wrote the book hospitality DNA, really introduced me to this idea that he, I believe he got from Alex Day, which is the idea that your guest experience starts not when someone walks in your door, but when they first think about walking you in your door.

Chris Schneider 03:05  
That's why I like to talk about cohesive concepts, and that we need that experience to work from the very beginning to the very end. So let's talk a little bit about why that excellent service is imperative to your business. So post-pandemic we've seen consumers prioritize restaurant purchases in their spending decisions. So it's not like people are not going out to eat. They prioritize going out to eat. That's according to the National Restaurant Association. Now, if we look at technology, one thing I find really interesting is that when we look at millennials and Gen Z, we have about 50% of them preferred tech enabled dining. However, millennials, 53% of them preferred tech enabled dining, while only 50% of Gen Z prefer tech enabled dining. And what that means is today. Now, some of this is going to depend on where in the world or where in the United States you are. SR. But today, most of your guests really don't care. Because I'm going to guess Gen X is a lot lower than 50%. I'm going to guess baby boomers are a lot lower than 50%.

Chris Schneider 04:06  
Gen Z cares about tech enabled dining less than millennials, so that's not necessarily something we have to worry about in our customer experience. However, if you're going to do that tech enabled dining, if you're going to have QR codes and allow people to pay from their phones at their table and all of that good stuff, make sure it works really, really well, because that 50% of Gen Z and millennials that enjoy that are not going to be happy when they try to use your tech and it doesn't work. Let's talk about the financial impact of our service. Acquiring new customers cost between 5 and 25 times more. Let me say that again acquiring a new customer cost you 5 to 25 times more than retaining a current guest. That's why we want 80% of our guests to be returning in only 20% to be new people, because bringing in new guests guest is freaking expensive. And guess with positive experiences. If you give people a good experience, not only are they going to come back, but 60% of the time they are going to dine more frequently.

Chris Schneider 05:06  
And 39% are going to spend more money. So not only does it cost us all this money to bring in a new guest, the better we do at retaining the guests we have, the more they're going to spend with us. They're more they're going to come in. And if we have a loyalty program in place, and we've talked about this in the last couple of weeks, benefits of having a loyalty program. We're going to see guests spend about 39% more than non-members of our loyalty program. So the ROI on all of this service experience is huge, right? If we can stop acquiring new customers, that cost us huge amounts more than getting a customer to return. If we can get our guests to dine more frequently and spend more, and if we can engage them in ways that promote what they want and give them a great experience. We're going to make more money at the end of the day. But again, like I said at the top, this episode is not about finances per se. So how do we get there? So the main thing we want to look for here, when we talk about how do we get our guests to come in more? How do we make this happen? Well, we need a system to get there.

Chris Schneider 06:17  
And the first step is to map our customer journey. Now, that sounds kind of crazy, but you know what? Here's the thing. It. Every service business there is, every product there is should start with mapping your customer journey. You need to know what is it like for that guest to go from the very beginning to the very end of their experience? And the only way to do that is to map it all out. And this includes what I was just talking about with Dave Neitzel, where we have to look at the entirety of the guest experience from the very second they think about what they're going to do. The second they think about the fact that they might want to go out for drinks on Friday night, on Tuesday through, after they leave? So when we map the guest experience, we want to include all of that. So one of the things the first part of our journey that we want to map is what are the pre visit touchpoints. Our website, our Google profile, our Facebook page, our Instagram, our TikTok.

Chris Schneider 07:16  
Where are those customers coming into contact with us before they come in or when they decide to come in? Now your online presence here is really, really important. That's because most of your guests are going to interact with you online before anything else. So make sure you're looking at what are your reviews? What are your ratings? What is your sentiment analysis online? Look at things like Reddit, because that's going to have some great information about what people think of you. Now the bottom line here is if you have less than A44 star rating on Google, you got some problems. That's because generally customers don't trust restaurants with less than a four star rating. and I forget the exact number off the top of my head, but I want to say there was a Harvard study and I should have looked it up before I recorded this, but I didn't. But it's something like every star, right? So if you have one star versus five stars, it's worth like 20% of your business, right? So you're going to make more.

Chris Schneider 08:11  
You're going to do better when you have those previous touchpoints really in place. And I've said this before, I will always say this when it comes to reviews. Make sure on the reviews, whether they're good, bad or otherwise, that you are actually responding to them. Then in your customer journey. So this is all the stuff that happens beforehand. Now I should say, right, we're talking about bars here, but if you're a bar that takes reservations, your reservation experience is included in that as well. But now we want to look at okay. So that's before they come in. Now what happens when they arrive? What does your door look like? What is it like walking up to your bar? Do you have security? What's that like? Do you have a host or someone that's going to seat them? Or do you just expect people to come in and find a spot to sit like most bars do. And if that's the case, how do they know that? Right. Do you have a sign that says, please be seated.

Chris Schneider 08:56  
Do you train your servers and your bartender say, hey, welcome in, guys. Sit wherever you want. What are you doing to make sure that arrival experience from the time they park in your parking lot or down the street, to walking into your bar, to getting seated and getting that first drink, what does that look like now? One of the big things here, and this is absolutely true. You want to make sure people are acknowledged pretty much 3 or 4 steps in the door, and you want to get their order within two minutes. If you're not there within two minutes, people start to freak out a little bit. Now, obviously, if you're super busy and running around and they can see that, okay, maybe you have 3 or 4 minutes, but really that two minute window to make that initial impression, to start to work with your guests, to sit down and talk to them. That's what you've got. And anything longer than that, you're going to devalue your guest experience.

Chris Schneider 09:46  
So once they've come in, you've greeted them. You've said they've started to get an order now. right? So what is your ordering experience look like now? Depending on the type of bar you are. This can differ greatly. Right. Because if we think about this, if you're a high end cocktail bar speakeasy that takes reservations and has, oh, jazz music and you have a whole club thing going on and you're taking care of it, that's gonna be way different than if you're, you know, Joe's Neighborhood Bar in BFE, and people just walk in and sit down and go, hey, you want Miller Light or Bud Light? Because that's what we got. Those are two totally different experiences, but you need to define how your ordering experience should work. You need to make sure that your team is really on top of that. Because here's the thing we all know this, but a better customer experience equals better tips. Better tips equal a more happy staff. So everyone's aligned here. You and your team are aligned on making sure that you've defined that experience.

Chris Schneider 10:48  
Now once you get through ordering, right? How are you handling food? Do you have food? Are you bringing food menus automatically? Are you asking them if they want a food menu when you take the drink order? Does it depend on the time of day? Right. Because I think we all know that at 7:00, if a couple comes in and sits down, they probably want to eat. If at 4:00, three guys come in because they left work a little early, they want to get a drink before they go home. They probably aren't eating, or maybe they maybe they are. But what is that procedure look like? How are you checking with them? And then how are you handling that food? Again, this should be the same on every guest. And then we want to map the end of the journey. So what does it look like when they pay? What does it look like when they leave? Are you following up with them? Are you collecting emails and sending emails? Are you doing anything of that nature? Also, if you're doing takeout, if you're doing DoorDash, if you're using Grubhub or anything like that, how are you making that experience great and how are you engaging them afterwards? Because a lot of people, if they like ordering food from a place, yeah, they may not go out, but they're ordering food on a regular basis.

Chris Schneider 11:47  
They're going to order from you repeatedly. So how can you make that guest experience better? So you want to map that journey end to end? First of all, you're doing that to understand where you are today. And then we're going to look at that map and say where can we do things better. So the first part of where we can do things better is going to be setting up a service standards framework. Right. And you need measurable standards. Now like I said, depending on the type of bar you are this could be different. But what is it going to look like for you? Should it be, you know, somebody three steps in the door. Somebody needs to tell them hello or is it 15 seconds or, you know, do you need to be at the table and greet people within two minutes? How do you take those orders? How do you handle everything? And obviously that service standards framework like I've been talking about is going to be a little different depending on your customer journey, but you need to constantly optimize it.

Chris Schneider 12:33  
You need to work on it. You need to figure out how to make your guests have a better time, have a better experience while they're with you. The other thing that you need to set up in your service standards framework is your recovery standard. So when there's a problem, how does that happen? How do you fix that? Because here's the thing that that I think a lot of times we overlook. A lot of times it's really easy, especially when we're busy, especially when we're stressed, especially when things aren't going around to look at every customer that's complaining is like, oh shit, you just want some shit for free and you really don't care about me, and you're just an asshole and I don't want to deal with you. And yeah, sometimes that is absolutely factually accurate, right? Not every guest complaint is a valid complaint, although we should always treat every guest complaint as a valid complaint unless we know otherwise. Because here's the thing. When you have somebody that has a really bad experience and you solve that and you fix it for them, about 80% of those people will return, and a lot of those folks will become your regulars.

Chris Schneider 13:24  
So always make sure you have a set way to do your recovery. Now, again, depending on what type of bar you are, what kind of atmosphere you have, that may look different. But the bottom line is when someone has an issue and you resolve that issue, you build regulars. So make sure you have a way in your service standards to handle recovery, and that you do it the same every time and it is effective. Now you also need to implement feedback, right? So if we understand the journey and we've set the standards now we need to see okay do these work. How do we do that. We get feedback from our guests. And you can look at all different ways of getting feedback. You can do surveys. You can do sentiment analysis. You can scrape Reddit and Facebook and Google and see what that brings up. The bottom line here is, unless you're looking for the feedback, unless you care to see what's going wrong, you're not going to know and then you're going to lose because of that.

Chris Schneider 14:16  
You're going to lose because you don't understand where you're not meeting your guests expectations. You're going to lose because your guests aren't getting what they want. So you have to understand what that is. And then over time, adjust your systems, adjust your service standards to meet that feedback, something I think is important here. 73% of poor experiences result in negative word of mouth if unresolved. So we just mentioned a second ago, if you resolve a poor experience, 78% of those people will come back. If you don't resolve it about the same number, you're going to badmouth you. So you need to see this feedback. You need to review your reviews on a weekly basis, at least at a minimum. You need to respond to your reviews online. If you have bad things being said about you on Reddit, go and respond to it. And when you respond, I mean, I've done this before, right? So, so, so far be it for me to say, you shouldn't do this, but you really shouldn't.

Chris Schneider 15:12  
Even though I've done it, but just don't respond in a shitty way, right? Be open. Be honest, but also be caring. Show your guests that you care. Because when you respond to a review, when you respond to feedback online, you are responding to the person that made that feedback, right. You are responding to the person that made that complaint. But that's not actually the goal here, right? It's less about getting the person that complained because maybe their complaint is ridiculous. Maybe they're a ridiculous person right now. More often than not, that's not the case. But let's just pretend for a second that is the case, that a completely B.S. review, when you respond to that and you do it politely and you do it kindly and you do it nicely. You're not necessarily trying to get the person that wrote that review to come back in. You're trying to show to everyone else that you're not the ahole, that you aren't the one that did something bad. Did you care about what guests say? That you care about what your guests think? Because that's going to show other guests potential future guests.

Chris Schneider 16:11  
Other people going through this customer journey, starting at the pre visit stage that you care that you actually want to make. Your guests have great experiences. People will give you more slack if they think you care and they will give you zero slack if they think you're an asshole. That is just human nature. Now, what do we do with all this feedback? When we get it, we have to implement a continuous improvement process. Now we've talked a lot about that and there are some previous episodes if you want to really look into continuous improvement. But here's the bottom line. When something's wrong, you identify the real problem, you fix the problem, you see what happens. So feedback is great. Monitoring feedback is great, but doing nothing with it. You might as well not even look at it because you're not. It's just you're wasting your own time. So if you're going to capture the feedback, what you really have to do to be successful in this business nowadays, then you must do something with it.

Chris Schneider 17:07  
And what you do with it is you problem solve and come up with solutions and you implement a programme of continuous improvement. Now, the last piece I want to talk about here in kind of this customer experience blueprint and how to use customer experience to increase your sales to make your life easier is you have to build a service culture. So what do I mean when I say build a service culture? Well, one of the things that I know many of you have heard me say before is if you are leading your team, you have to be a servant leader. You serve your team. Your team serves your guests how you serve your team is how your team serves your guests. So unless you want to create a situation where your guests are mistreated, the last thing you can do is mistreat your team. And you want your team involved then in creating these standards with you. You want them to understand. You want them to bring their ideas to the table as part of continuous improvement, so that you can build this service culture.

Chris Schneider 18:06  
You serve your team. Your team serves your guests. How you treat your team is how they treat your guests. Everything rolls downhill, folks. And so as part of this building of service culture, we want to build recognition programs. We want to have daily shout outs to people that do a great job. We want to have potentially things like employee of the week, employee of the month. Yeah. Is that hokey? Is it stupid? Sure. Absolutely. So come up with a way to do it that isn't hokey. Come up with a way to do it that isn't weird. If you think it's weird, come up with a program that you like. Maybe you give out a monthly bonus based upon people's performance and KPIs. Like, I kind of think that's a great idea. Maybe you do some profit sharing with your staff. But the bottom line here is when you prioritize your staff, you create a great guest experience. These two things are linked, and there is no way, no way that you will ever separate those.

Chris Schneider 18:56  
And that means that you must constantly train your staff, right? Continuous improvement also means continuous training, and we'll talk about that in the next couple of weeks. We're going to talk about continuous training. But ongoing education should look like about four hours a month of training for everyone on your team. And the most important thing, though, when it comes to building a service culture again is you have to be the example. You have to model your leadership because if you aren't doing that as the owner, your team won't do that for your guests and you're never going to get ahead. So to kind of wrap us up for today, the big thing here is your customer experience is going to determine, more than anything, how much money you can make, more than any of the math, more than any of the numbers, more than what you charge, more than anything. If you have a bad customer experience, you won't make money. If you have great customer experience, you probably will win money. Those two things are true.

Chris Schneider 19:45  
Those are facts of our business. There are some exceptions, but those are more or less facts of our business. Now, how do you do that? First of all, you ensure that you have great service. You look at service excellence as something that is not a nice to have, not something you would like to do, but an absolute requirement of your bar. You map your customer journey. You say, hey, here's what it looks like for my guests before they come in all the way through, engaging them after they've dined with you or drank at your bar, you create a service standards framework that's going to allow your team to know what their job is, how to do it, and how to successfully give your guests the best experience possible and implement a feedback system that leads to continuous improvement. You're going to look at your reviews. You're going to scrape the internet for what you need to know about your own bar, and use that to make yourself better. And in doing that continuous improvement, you're going to involve your team to build a service culture where you are the leader, but you are a servant leader because you serve your team, and your team serves your guests.

Chris Schneider 20:51  
And you do all that through ongoing education with your team. So if you do all of this, it should increase your repeat visits. It should cause you to have a higher average spend with your guests. It should improve your online ratings and it should reduce your staff turnover. So if you haven't ever done it before, my task for you this week map out that customer journey, see what it looks like, and start to dive into some of these pieces. Because this is how you ensure that you have a bar that will continue for the long haul. That about wraps it up for today. If you enjoyed today's insights, make sure you like, subscribe and leave a review. If you are ready to take your bar to the next level, schedule a strategy session with me by clicking the link in the show notes below. Until next time, have a great day and we will talk again later.