The customer who had a lovely afternoon finishes their coffee, says thank you, and goes home. The customer whose order was ten minutes late writes 400 words that night. Reviews are written by the annoyed unless everybody gets asked — and asking is the job nobody on your staff wants.
The sign on the door, the line at the bottom of the receipt and the QR code on the table are all in the wrong place at the wrong time. The customer is paying, or leaving, or already gone. Nobody stops to open Google Maps on the way out.
And asking in person — “would you mind leaving us a review?” — puts a member of staff in an awkward position with every customer, every day, so they stop doing it after a week.
The ask has to be automatic, timed after the visit, and it has to come from you rather than from whoever was on shift.
You cannot email a customer for a review if you do not have their address, and a walk-in café does not. A card payment names a card, not a person. So the first step is not the review request; it is knowing who was in your place today.
The Wi-Fi sign-in is the answer. When a customer taps Continue with Google or leaves an email to get online, you have a real name, a real address and the time they were in. That is everything a well-timed review request needs.
1. A customer signs in to your Wi-Fi and ticks the box saying you can write to them. Optional, never a condition of getting online.
2. A few hours later — the timing is yours — they get a short email under your venue’s name: thanks for coming in, here is a link, tell us how it was.
3. The link goes straight to your Google listing. One tap, no searching for the right page.
4. Each customer is asked once. Regulars are not nagged on every visit.
It is not a rating gate. Everyone who opts in gets the same email. Some people will write about the slow order; more will write about the good afternoon, because now they have been asked while it was still fresh. A low score also raises private feedback to you, so you hear about the problem as well as the public review.
Asking customers for an honest review is fine. Paying for reviews, offering a free drink for five stars, or only asking the customers you think will be positive is against Google’s policies and gets listings penalised. An automatic, even-handed email to everyone who agreed to hear from you is exactly the kind of ask Google expects.
We do not build review filtering, deliberately. Routing happy customers to Google and burying the rest breaches Google’s review policies and TripAdvisor’s guidelines, and is a deceptive practice under the FTC’s 2024 rule on consumer reviews. The even-handed version is the one that survives contact with a platform’s enforcement team.
Once you know who was in, the review request is only the first thing you can send. The same list gets the new menu, the Friday band, the quiet-Tuesday offer, and a win-back note to someone who has not been in for a month.
A list of people who have actually sat in your place is the only customer record you will ever own.
A review request that arrives while the customer is still paying is ignored. One that arrives the next morning is remembered.
You set the delay. The clock starts from the visit, not from whenever somebody got round to exporting a list.
Automated review requests, timed after the visit, are included in the Café plan at $30 a month per venue after a 14-day free trial — along with the sign-in page that collects the addresses in the first place.
Set it up this week, or send us a photo of your Wi-Fi box and we will tell you what is involved.
You cannot email a card payment. The four seconds when a walk-in tells you who they are.
The A-board faces the wrong way. Get on the one screen everybody in the room is reading.
Every “what’s the Wi-Fi?” interrupts a sale. Take the sign down for good.
Ask everybody who came in, automatically, a few hours after the visit, with a link that goes straight to your listing. The reason most cafés cannot do this is that they do not know who was in — which is what a Wi-Fi sign-in solves.
Asking for honest reviews is fine. Paying for reviews, offering something in exchange for five stars, or only asking the customers you expect to be positive is against Google’s policies and gets listings penalised.
No, and you should not want to. Review filtering breaches Google’s review policies and TripAdvisor’s guidelines and is a deceptive practice under the FTC’s 2024 rule. Everyone who opted in gets the same ask; a low score additionally raises private feedback to you.
After the visit has ended and before the day has blurred. A few hours later is the usual answer, and the delay is yours to set. Asking at the till, while the customer is paying, is the one moment that reliably does not work.
No. Each customer is asked once rather than on every visit, which is both better manners and the reason your domain does not end up reported.
