Restaurateurs looking to improve their restaurant business need to find the right way to collect customer feedback. Surveys can be an excellent way to do this. By creating meaningful and actionable restaurant survey questions to ask your diners, you can gain valuable insights into your customers’ preferences. It’s an easy way to find out what your restaurant does well and where you have room to improve.
If you’re a restaurant owner looking to boost customer loyalty or improve customer satisfaction scores, it’s essential to gather the right information.
To help you, we’ve compiled this handy guide with ideas of the various restaurant survey questions you can ask to collect valuable feedback from your diners. Whether you run a fast-food restaurant or a fine-dining eatery, gathering customer insights can make all the difference for your service and food quality.
Restaurant surveys should be an important part of your business operations. They’ll let you gain essential customer insights about your restaurant's food quality, ambiance, and service, meaning you can get a clearer picture of the overall dining experience.
If you ask your customers relevant restaurant survey questions, you’ll get positive and negative feedback about your business. Survey responses will let you learn what your restaurant customers like and dislike about coming to eat with you — and with customer feedback in hand, you can clearly see what changes you need to make to ensure you have loyal customers who want to visit your restaurant time and again.
Soliciting feedback about your restaurant from customers isn’t always easy. Many people use online review sites to make their feelings known, but convincing people to fill out surveys or feedback forms can be more challenging. However, with the proper techniques, you can ensure a large-enough sample size to better understand your customer base.
Let’s say you want to send an online survey to your customers. The easiest way to send it is to include it in your restaurant’s email newsletter (if you have one). It’s a good idea to add an incentive to encourage customers to fill it out. Include a special offer for respondents, such as 10% off their next order. Alternatively, you could enter customers who answer your survey into a prize drawing for a gift card.
Ensuring your restaurant survey questions are easy to answer can also make a difference in the number of responses you get. Include an estimate of how long a survey will take or many questions it is. You can use a mix of closed- and open-ended questions so the survey doesn’t take too long but people still can give detailed feedback if they want.
Another option is to ask diners a couple of questions as they pay. Your front-of-house staff can ask a couple of feedback questions (“How was your food?” or “Was everything OK for you today?”) and report back to management. Alternatively, they could leave a short survey card with the check.
If you have a self-service restaurant, apps like KioskBuddy can also help you gain customer feedback. You can customize the checkout flow to ask your diners a couple of questions about their ordering experience. KioskBuddy will send the answers to you, making it quick and easy to ask short feedback questions.
The right restaurant survey questions can help you get a better picture of the overall guest experience in your restaurant. Here are 44 survey questions to ask your diners.
Remember, you don’t want your survey to be overwhelming for your customers, so choose a handful of questions from this list rather than use them all. Also be sure to use a mix of question types, from multiple choice and yes/no to open-ended questions.
Yes/no-styled restaurant survey questions are easy and quick to answer. If you can, use checkboxes, and ask respondents to choose either yes or no. You can also write these questions as statements and ask the respondent to choose true or false.
Or instead of yes/no or true/false, you can ask an either/or question, where you give two different response options for the customer to choose from. For example, one of our questions below asks, “Did you use the self-service kiosk or order with a member of the staff?” In this case, the two response options would be “self-service kiosk” or “member of the staff.”
Here are some yes/no questions you can ask:
Was it your first time dining with us?
Would you come back?
Did you enjoy your food?
Was the food hot enough?
Do you have any dietary restrictions?
If you have dietary restrictions, did you find something on the menu to meet your needs?
Did you think the food was a good value for the money?
Did you feel welcome in the restaurant?
Did a host greet you on arrival?
If you had to wait for a table, were you offered a place to sit?
Did your server make any recommendations or suggestions?
Did you use the self-service kiosk or order with a member of the staff?
Did you order your takeout food by phone or online?
Did you get everything you ordered?
Did your food arrive within the estimated time frame?
Would you order takeout from us again?
Would you say our restaurant is family-friendly?
Was the restaurant clean and tidy?
If you visited the restrooms, were they clean and well-stocked?
Multiple-choice questions are also easy and quick to answer. But since you can customize the answers the respondent can choose from, you can design them to get a little more information. You can even turn the above yes/no questions into multiple choice if you want to add more detail to the available responses.
Here are some multiple-choice restaurant survey questions you can ask:
20. How was your visit?
a. Perfect! I wouldn’t change anything.
b. Good
c. OK
d. Poor
e. Terrible
21. How often do you eat with us?
a. Often – roughly once a week
b. Regularly – about once a month
c. Now and then – once every few months
d. This is my first time
22. Roughly how far did you travel to reach the restaurant?
a. Less than a mile
b. 1 to 5 miles
c. 5 to 15 miles
d. More than 15 miles
23. How did you hear about our restaurant?
a. I saw an ad
b. A friend/family member recommended it
c. I walked/drove past
d. I was researching restaurants in the area
e. Other (please specify)
24. How were the portion sizes?
a. Too big
b. Just right
c. Too small
25. Roughly how long did you have to wait to be seated?
a. Under 3 minutes
b. 3 to 5 minutes
c. 5 to 10 minutes
d. 10 to 15 minutes
e. More than 15 minutes
26. Approximately how long did your food take to arrive?
a. Under 5 minutes
b. 5 to 10 minutes
c. 10 to 15 minutes
d. 15 to 20 minutes
e. More than 20 minutes
27. How easy was the reservation process?
a. Extremely easy — anyone could do it
b. Easy
c. Neither easy nor difficult
d. A little tricky but manageable
e. Impossible — a friend had to help me
28. How easy was it to pay for your order?
a. Extremely easy – anyone could do it
b. Easy
c. Neither easy nor difficult
d. A little tricky but manageable
e. Impossible – a member of the staff had to help me
29. Was your takeout food warm when you collected it or when it arrived?
a. Piping hot
b. Warm enough
c. A little cold
d. Freezing!
30. How were the noise levels in the restaurant?
a. Too loud
b. Just right
c. Too quiet
With this type of restaurant survey question, you can ask the respondent to answer based on a determined scale or rating system. For example, you might ask them to answer on a scale of 1-10 or give a rating from 1-5 stars. You can customize the rating or scale to best meet your needs.
Here are some questions that fall in this category:
31. How would you rate the choice available on our menu?
32. On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being the most likely and 1 being the least likely), how likely are you to recommend our restaurant to friends or family?
33. How would you rate your restaurant service overall?
34. How would you rate the overall speed of service when you dined with us?
35. On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being the easiest), how easy was it to place and pay for your order on the self-service kiosk?
36. How easy was it to use the online ordering system, on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being the easiest)?
Open-ended restaurant survey questions give respondents a space to provide feedback in their own words. These questions take the longest time to answer, so be sure to limit how many you ask.
Here are some open-ended questions you could include in your survey:
37. What was the best part of your visit?
38. Is there anything we could have done to improve your visit?
39. What did you like least about your visit?
40. Do you have any other feedback about your visit you’d like to share?
41. Are there any menu items you would particularly recommend?
42. Are there any menu items you wouldn’t order again? If so, why?
43. Why did you choose to order takeout instead of dine-in?
44. What did you like or not like about the restaurant atmosphere?
By asking your diners the right questions, you can collect essential guest feedback and take the necessary steps to improve your restaurant business. Whether you send online customer surveys with your restaurant marketing newsletter, hand customers a feedback card with the check, or embed a small restaurant questionnaire into your checkout system, you can gain valuable feedback that will show you where things need work.
KioskBuddy makes it easy to collect customer feedback as part of the self-service process. The app has a customizable checkout flow, meaning you can add a couple of survey questions for guests to answer as they place their orders. It’s quick and easy to set up, so you’ll be ready to go in no time.
Download KioskBuddy today and enjoy 30 days absolutely free.