40 Restaurant Survey Questions to Help You Get Crucial Feedback

Customer feedback is a guiding light in the restaurant industry. No matter how well you plan, or how thoroughly you craft the guest experience, you’ll never get to experience your restaurant as your guests do. Even if you sit at a table for a whole shift and watch – which you should do – you still won’t get the full picture.

The only way to know what it’s like to dine at your restaurant is to actually ask your restaurant customers, and you can do this by conducting a brief restaurant survey. You can obtain valuable insights through a customer satisfaction survey, in the form of comment cards, through an emailed or texted receipt, or on your handheld POS system. You can ask in person, or look around for what people are already saying on Yelp and other review sites.

However, if you’re not asking the right restaurant survey questions, you won’t obtain useful information that can improve your restaurant. For example, don’t ask two or three-part questions. You’re likely to only get an answer to one of them, says Restaurant Engine. Be sure to mix multiple-choice and open-ended questions together. This allows customers to express their thoughts, feelings, and opinions in their own words, says Kapiche.

Here are 40 questions that you can choose from to put on your restaurant survey. By no means should you use all of them – no one will take the time to answer all of them – but look through these and decide which ones you need answered in your business. You can also rotate the restaurant questionnaire to gather different types of honest feedback at different times. Once you've chosen your questions, read on and learn what to do with the answers.

Key Takeaways

• Question Selection: Choose a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended questions to gather comprehensive insights. Avoid complex multi-part questions to ensure clear responses.

• Best Types of Questions: This includes categories of questions for general customer demographics, facilities, food quality, service, technology, and takeout experiences.

• Actionable Insights: Analyze feedback regularly and prioritize addressing severe issues immediately, especially those related to health, accessibility, and severe customer dissatisfaction.

• Survey Implementation: Keep surveys concise and offer incentives to encourage participation. Regularly update survey questions to address different aspects of the dining experience over time.

• Customer Loyalty: Tailoring surveys to specific concerns can enhance customer loyalty by demonstrating that you value their input and are committed to improving their experience.

• Resource Utilization: Use feedback to make operational changes, improve staff performance, and enhance the overall dining experience. Consider using tools like POS systems and NPS surveys to streamline feedback collection and analysis.

Questions to ask on your restaurant survey

The Two Most Important Customer Experience Questions

Don’t conduct a survey without asking both of these questions in some form or another. You’ll learn about your biggest strengths and weaknesses across the whole operation. More on other ways to ask these questions below.

• What was the best part of your visit?

• What was the worst part of your visit?

General Questions

Gather information about your customer demographic, how they heard about you, and the basics about your restaurant.

• Was this your first time at the restaurant?

• How did you hear about us?

  • Social media

  • Website
  • Referral
  • In-person advertisement

• How often do you visit? 

• How likely is it that you would come back? Very Likely / Likely / Unlikely / Very Unlikely.

• Do you find that our restaurant is family-friendly? Yes / No and Explain.

• Are our hours convenient? Yes / No and Explain.

• How far did you travel to visit us today?

• If _____ was an option, would you try it out? (This question can be adjusted to fit any new process or product you’re considering testing – an online reservation process, a new dish, a drink special, etc.) Yes / No and Explain.

Facilities Questions

These questions will address issues of accessibility and cleanliness in your restaurant.

• If you use a wheelchair, did you find the staff and facilities accommodating? Yes / No and Explain.

• Were the seats comfortable? Yes / No and Explain.

• Were the bathrooms and other facilities clean? Yes / No and Explain.

• Was the music volume to your liking? Yes / No and Explain.

• Was the parking area sufficient and convenient? Yes / No and Explain.

Food Quality Questions

The food and drinks at your restaurant is typically the main reason why someone chose to dine there, so make sure your menu design and items are at their best.

• How would you rate the value of our food? Rate from 1 (Poor Value for Money) to 5 (Great Value for Money).

• Were you pleased with our drink offerings? Yes / No and Explain.

• Are there any menu items that you think are missing? Yes / No and Explain.

• Do you find our menu has something for everyone? Yes / No and Explain.

• How would you rate the range of our menu options? Too Few Options / Just Right / Too Many Options.

• If you have dietary preferences, were you accommodated well today? Yes / No and Explain.

• Were the portion sizes to your liking? Yes / No and Explain.

Service Questions

Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group says, “the way we were making people feel was even more powerful than what we put on the plate and in the glass.” Your restaurant service quality can have a huge impact on whether or not a first-time customer becomes a regular, so make sure everything is in check.

• Who was your server today? (This question is particularly helpful if you’re trying to figure out who your star servers are and who might need a little more training.)

• Was the service friendly and welcoming? Yes / No and Explain.

• How was the speed of service? Did it come out fast enough? Yes / No and Explain.

• How was the ambiance and noise level in the restaurant?

• If there were any issues, did your server handle them well? Yes / No and Explain.

Tech Questions

If you’ve recently implemented new POS technology, it’s worth asking your customers how they perceive the user restaurant experience. If you’re offering a food delivery service via an online ordering system, make sure that the food is arriving quickly and that it arrives fresh.

• Did our restaurant technology help make your checkout system efficient? Yes / No and Explain.

• Did you enjoy using our handheld checkout system and/or kiosk? Yes / No and Explain.

• If you ordered online, how quickly did your food arrive? 

• If you ordered online, did the food appear and taste fresh when it arrived? Yes / No and Explain.

• Which online ordering system did you use? 

• Did you use any of our discounts or special offers?

Takeout Questions

You shouldn't limit your surveys to just your dine-in guests. To gain a better understanding of your customers' experiences, include feedback questions for takeout and delivery services. By doing so, you can gather valuable insights into off-premises dining by asking the questions below.

• Was it easy to place your takeout order? Yes / No and Explain.

• Was your takeout order accurate? Yes / No and Explain.

• Was the quality of the food satisfactory upon delivery or pickup? Yes / No and Explain.

• Was the food packaging warm enough to keep your food at the right temperature? Yes / No and Explain.

• Did your takeout order arrive within the expected time estimate? Yes / No and Explain.

• What could we do to improve your takeout experience?

• How did you hear about our takeout services?

How to Get Answers to Your Questions: POS & NPS

It's important to gather valuable feedback as frequently as possible, so one way to get the most important questions out of the way is through your POS system. Toast’s Guest Feedback feature texts or emails the following question to a customer, as a follow-up to their answer on the thumbs up / thumbs down question on a Toast Go POS, Kiosk, or Online Ordering.

You can also approach this type of question by measuring your customer NPS (Net Promoter Score), like Saddleback BBQ does. NPS is a calculation of what percentage of your customers are your promoters, and what percentage are your detractors. Saddleback’s simple survey asks “How likely are you to recommend Saddleback BBQ to someone you know?” (with a 1-10 rating), and asks for an explanation why. Then the results are tallied up (you can use the NPS calculator that Saddleback recommends, provided by Delighted) and you’ll have an idea of how many of your customers promote you in their circles – and how you can get that number up.

What to Do With All This Restaurant Feedback

Now that you’ve got your questions in order, it’s important to actually implement some changes that your customers have asked for, explains Vertical Response. Otherwise, collecting feedback is a waste of time. You don’t have to fix every single issue that’s mentioned on all of your survey responses right away, but you should absolutely keep an eye out for severe negative feedback and commonly mentioned issues that could impact your restaurant atmosphere. 

Anything that has to do with health or accessibility should always be addressed right away, as well as any issue that has been written by a very angry customer. Here are a few examples of severe issues that should be addressed after one report:

• A wheelchair user says that they couldn’t reach the soap in the bathroom.

• Someone mentions that their dietary restrictions were not accommodated properly.

• A person mentions that a server was extremely rude.

When dealing with reported issues that revolve around personal customer preferences, it makes sense to wait and see if it’s a trend before making a big change in your restaurant. For that reason, it’s important to track guest feedback and analyze it every week, at least. Any of these three complaints mentioned more than a few times could be indicative of a larger issue:

• A person mentions that their dish was overcooked.

• Someone reports that the restaurant doesn’t feel family-friendly.

• A person comments that the music was too loud.

When it comes to gathering a guest feedback form, it’s crucial to be asking the right questions on your restaurant survey. Reflect on what aspects of your restaurant might need some work, and build out your survey from there. Don’t just ask the questions you’ve seen on other restaurant customer surveys; one size definitely does not fit all. Additionally, tailoring your survey to address specific concerns can significantly enhance customer loyalty by showing guests that you value their input and are committed to improving their experience.

Finally, make sure your restaurant survey isn’t too long – don’t provide a feedback survey that you wouldn’t want to take as a customer or restaurateur. You can provide incentives, like a chance to win a gift card, if you find people are hesitant to give their opinions. Then use the information that you collect to make your restaurant’s overall dining experience the best it can be.

Related Restaurant Operations Resources

• Cost to Open a Restaurant

• POS System Cost

• Restaurant Marketing

• Restaurant POS System

• Restaurant Business Plan

• Restaurant Licenses and Permits