The flat white was good. Google only knows if somebody writes it down.

Hundreds of covers a week. A handful of reviews a year.

Nobody behind the counter has time to ask, and that is the entire gap between hundreds of covers and a handful of reviews.

You're on the machine, someone else is on the till, and nobody behind the counter is texting forty covers a day. So the reviews you do get are the ones people volunteer, which skews to the two extremes and misses everyone who simply had a nice flat white and went back to work.

Review count and rating decide how prominent Google considers the listing. Replies do something different: they get read by the next customer, working out whether the one star about a slow Sunday was a fair call or just a bad day.

A café earns more reviews in a single Saturday than most trades see all month, and asks for almost none of them.

Doesn't matter if the room's in central Hastings, Havelock North, Napier, Taradale or Clive, or one of the spots around the Bay that lives on weekend visitor traffic. Wherever it is, the same profile does the selling before the customer walks in.

This is not another blast to the customer list

Most review tools assume every customer left a name and a number, the way a plumbing invoice or a builder's contract does. A café's till doesn't work like that. Most of what crosses the counter is a tap and a "thanks", no contact attached, and pretending otherwise is how a tool ends up doing nothing.

What actually works is drawing from the places a real contact already exists: booked tables, catering and function jobs, order-ahead, and loyalty sign-ups. If you already run a QR code at the counter, I work alongside it. If you don't, this isn't the thing that gets you one.

Everyone on that list gets asked, including the table that grumbled about the wait. Filtering for who you think will leave five stars is exactly what breaches Google's review policies, and it's also the fastest way to make a profile look coached instead of real.

Not a call centre. Not software you have to configure yourself. I set it up with you personally on the call, and if a customer's unhappy I'm the one who gets the text before Google does. No lock-in, so if a month goes by and it hasn't earned its keep, you cancel it and that's the end of it.

How it works in a room with a queue

One honest limit up front: this runs from contact details, so a cash walk-in who never gives you one can't be asked.

Nobody's left off the list for having complained about the wait. Everyone gets the same message, which is what Google's review policies require.

Pricing for a busy room

One catering booking that went to the café down the road is worth more than a year of this.

No lock-in. Month to month, and you can stop any time.

What café owners usually ask

Other Hawke's Bay businesses I do this for

Same system, same price. What changes is where the contact list comes from.