Industry Insights
60 Restaurant Survey Questions to Ask Your Guests
Sevenrooms
6 min read
Feb 5, 2024
Sevenrooms
6 min read
Feb 5, 2024
In a perfect world, you’d know what your guests are thinking at all times. But technology hasn’t advanced that far just yet, which means finding ways to collect feedback falls to you and your team.
You can certainly gather customer feedback via comment cards or in person, but asking guests how they’re enjoying their meals can only take you so far, as many may not feel comfortable voicing their concerns.
When you let guests respond privately — like via a post-meal feedback questionnaire email — you’ll be able to elicit more useful feedback and accurately gauge customer satisfaction.
We’ve compiled 60 restaurant survey questions to help you get the most out of your surveys. These in-depth questions cover a breadth of topics including food, service, ambiance, reservations and off-premises dining.
Guest feedback is important to the restaurant business because it helps you improve your service, menu and overall dining experience according to how your guest perceives it.
Public review sites rarely tell the whole story. According to Harvard Business Review, online reviews “tend to over-represent the most extreme view with many extreme positive and/or negative reviews, and few moderate opinions.” That’s why it’s common to see scathing reviews about how difficult it is to find parking near a restaurant, or raving reviews about a chocolate cake, but less neutral feedback.
While those polarizing reviews are useful, they can mislead you into thinking something is worse than it actually is and keep you from focusing on more meaningful areas of improvement.
Sending post-meal restaurant customer satisfaction surveys via email gives guests the opportunity to share honest feedback anonymously (to the public eye, at least). Email surveys also remove friction because guests don’t need to make an account or share their thoughts in person, making them more inclined to share their opinions.
Without further ado, here are 60 restaurant customer survey questions to ask guests after a dine-in or takeout meal. For easier navigation, we’ve organized the questions into the following categories: overall customer experience, food, service, ambiance, reservations and online orders. Tailor these questions to your restaurant and the type of experience guests had.
At a minimum, it’s important to ask these general experience questions. Their answers will expose potential strengths and weaknesses across your business.
Granular data is the key to delivering a personalized guest experience. If guests indicate a willingness to return, consider how you can use that to inform your restaurant marketing. For example, you might opt to offer survey respondents an incentive to join your loyalty program, advertise your other locations, or invite them to an upcoming event.
Food is the primary reason why people dine out. Make sure your menu is the best it can be by soliciting feedback about your drink and food quality with these questions.
The quality of restaurant service is often just as memorable as the food, and can quickly turn a first-time diner into a loyal regular. The questions below will help you understand how your front-of-house team is doing and how their performance can be improved.
When you’re close to the business, it’s easy to take things for granted about the ambiance. Ask these questions to understand what your guests think of your restaurant’s atmosphere.
As you learn more about your customer preferences for food, seating and service, place these details in a centralized hub your team can access at a moment’s notice. With SevenRooms’ restaurant CRM, you can add customizable guest tags to each diner profile according to survey responses, such as positive or negative reviewer, to ensure a more personalized experience during their next visit.
The guest experience begins as soon as a customer attempts to make a reservation, so you must continually audit this process as part of your online surveys.
If you use restaurant technology to power your online ordering system and takeout processes, don’t forget to also gauge the off-premise user experience by asking these questions.
Online review websites are powerful tools to help you better understand what guests think of your business. However, online reviews are typically a result of a reactive approach to understanding the guest experience.
Surveys allow you to proactively collect guest feedback and act on it before a review goes public — and the best way to do that is through marketing automation.
By automatically sending guests restaurant surveys via email after every experience, you’re getting ahead of feedback and can more efficiently gauge customer satisfaction to adjust your service, menu and ambiance accordingly.
SevenRooms’ guest feedback software automatically emails every guest a survey after dining in your restaurant or ordering online. Feedback is then linked to each guest’s profile in your SevenRooms customer relationship management (CRM) system, so your whole team knows what guests thought of their previous dining experiences and can use that to tailor service.
To learn more, request a demo today.
Guest feedback is essential to the restaurant business for many reasons. Reviews can help you build healthy relationships with your guests and adjust service to fit customers’ needs. Most importantly, allowing guests to leave reviews can help them feel more valued, leading to repeat customers and increased sales in the future.
The best way to get customers to leave reviews is by making reviews part of your in-person engagement strategy, especially with regulars. Send post-meal feedback surveys via SevenRooms to find out what guests are really thinking. Social media and online reviews are other excellent ways to engage customers. It is essential to reply to online reviews to satisfy customers and make them feel connected to your restaurant.
