How to get more ratings and reviews for your restaurant, honestly

The honest way to get more ratings is to ask: every customer, at the end of the meal, in a sentence, with nothing offered in return. Most people who enjoyed eating with you would happily rate it and never think to, so a word from staff, a line on the receipt and a sign by the till do most of the work. Then reply to what comes in, the good and the bad.

The dishonest ways are faster for a month and cost you for years. Here is how to do it properly.

Why you should never pay for a rating

Free dessert for a five-star review. Ten percent off if you rate us today. A competition for everybody who leaves a review. They all buy the same thing: a score that describes your offer, not your food.

The next customer reads that score to decide whether to trust you with their evening, and a rating that was paid for tells them nothing true. When the meal does not match it, they do not blame the rating; they blame you, and they say so.

Two related habits do the same damage more quietly:

• Asking only the customers who seemed pleased. A score built from the happy tables is a score the next customer will not recognise. Ask everybody, the same way.
• Asking staff, friends and family to rate you. It is not evidence about your food, and on Mosey ratings from a venue's own owners and staff are excluded from the score that decides Mosey Gold automatically.

Ratings on Mosey come from people who went, usually with a photograph of what they ate. That is what makes them worth reading, and it is only true while nobody is buying them.

When is the best moment to ask?

After they have eaten, before they have left. Once somebody is out the door, the meal is already competing with the rest of their day.

The natural moments:

• When the bill goes down. "If you enjoyed it, a rating really helps us." One sentence, then leave it.
• After a compliment. When somebody tells a server the lamb was the best they have had, that is the easiest ask of the night: "Would you put that in a rating? It helps people find us."
• At the counter, as a takeaway or a coffee is handed over to a regular.
• On the bag or the receipt for collection orders, where there is nobody to say it.

A customer who collects a Mosey order is also prompted to rate it a little while afterwards, so your collection customers are asked without anybody remembering to.

How to ask without it being awkward

Give your staff the words, so nobody has to invent them mid-service. Something like:

"Glad you enjoyed it. If you have a minute later, a rating on Mosey helps us more than you would think, especially if you say what you had."

Then stop. No follow-up, no hovering while they get their phone out, and nothing promised in return. Put the same line on a small card by the till or on the receipt, and on your menu footer if you like. Mention it in your own posts now and then, without turning every post into a request.

The ask works best when it comes from somebody who served them. A sign helps; a person helps more.

Ask about the dish, not only the score

"Say what you had" is the most useful part of the ask. A rating that names the dish helps the next customer decide what to order, which a score alone never does.

On Mosey it does more than that. Dishes can be rated in their own right, and a well-rated, photographed dish can be found on its own by somebody searching for that dish, who has never heard of your business. Your menu does some of the selling for you, but only if your dishes have photographs and ratings. Put good photographs of your best dishes on your menu too, so the first rating has something to live up to.

What do you do with a bad rating?

Reply, once, calmly, and specifically. You cannot delete a rating on Mosey, and you would not want to be on a platform where you could, because then nobody would trust your good ones either.

Name the actual problem, say what happened or what changed if either is true, offer to sort it out privately, and stop. Do not argue, even when you are right: the reader sees a business arguing with a customer and moves on. You can report a rating that is abusive, is not about your business or breaks the content rules, and a person reads it. Our guide to replying to ratings goes through it in detail.

Reply to the good ones too, briefly. A page where only the complaints have answers looks defensive. A page where everything has a one-line reply looks like a place that is paying attention.

How ratings bring in customers on Mosey

Customers see how many people rated you as well as the average, because four ratings and four hundred are different kinds of evidence. A steady stream of new ratings is what builds the count, and the count is what lets a stranger trust the number.

Consistent ratings also earn Mosey Gold. A venue earns it at a 4.70 average, recalculated every night, and keeps it until the average falls below 4.40. There is no minimum number of ratings, nobody can pay for it, and it replaces your score on every card and is a filter customers use directly. In a smaller town, the people filtering for Gold are choosing from a very short list.

Read them for the thing you can fix

One complaint is one person on one night. The same complaint three times is a measurement: the draught by the window, the forty-minute wait on Saturdays, the chips that arrive cold.

Fix the repeated ones, then say so in your next reply ("we moved that table"), because that is the most convincing sentence a place can write. It also does more for your average than any amount of asking.

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