What is the best way a business can grow? Even a kid can answer it: by satisfying its customers with its products and services! Right? It’s a no-brainer. See, for a business to sustain the test of time, it is important to understand and consider its customers’ requirements.
To achieve this, businesses can conduct market research using tools like a market research questionnaire or sample restaurant survey questions. By asking targeted restaurant service survey questions, businesses can gather valuable insights to continually improve their offerings.
Now, let’s understand this with a short story. Sarah, a food enthusiast, decides to visit a restaurant. Having heard unending praises about this restaurant, she expects good hospitality, a relaxing ambiance, and exotic dishes. She visits the restaurant and has these experiences there:
She’s greeted warmly and seated promptly.
The menu promises enticing dishes.
Her appetizers take too long to arrive
The main course is slightly undercooked
The ambient music is too loud for her liking.
In this story, Sarah leaves with a mixed bag of feelings about the restaurant. She wanted to share her thoughts with the owners, but there was no mechanism in place.
Without knowing Sarah’s true experience, the restaurant missed a vital opportunity to improve and tailor their offerings to meet customer expectations. This is where restaurant marketing surveys come in.
If you are a restaurant owner and want to turn around your business, look no further. By surveying your customers, you can get invaluable guest feedback to bridge the gap between their expectations and experience. In the restaurant industry, understanding your target customers is crucial. Conducting market research with tailored food restaurant survey questions allows you to gather customer feedback effectively. This process can provide you with the insights needed to make meaningful improvements and enhance your restaurant’s success.
So, the million-dollar question is, are your customers satisfied? Well, a simple survey can answer all your questions. Are there minor tweaks or major overhauls needed to grow your restaurant?
This comprehensive guide will delve into the art of conducting restaurant marketing surveys. What are the key components to consider while designing the restaurant survey questions? Let’s jump right in!
What is the Aim of a Restaurant Marketing Survey?
Source – https://www.zonkafeedback.com/blog/restaurant-survey-questions-for-guest-feedback
Surely, you should have read the introduction and understood why you need a restaurant marketing survey. But, instead of conducting a directionless survey, you should have clear goals in mind. Here are the key goals you should have in mind while preparing your restaurant marketing survey questions:
1. Understanding Customer Preferences
If your customers repeatedly face the same inconvenience, they will be put off. As a result, your footfall will be reduced, leading to losses. You can gather information on what your customers like or dislike by conducting a restaurant marketing survey.
You can use the information from this survey to tailor your services and create an attractive menu that your customers like. This will ensure that your restaurant business doesn’t run out of gas.
2. Enhancing Customer Experiences
Source – https://www.zonkafeedback.com/blog/restaurant-survey-questions-for-guest-feedback
Several things uplift the experience of customers at your restaurant. These include:
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The Decoration of your restaurant
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Lighting around your restaurant
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Arrangement of the counters and tables
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The ambiance of your restaurant
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Type of music you play and its volume levels
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Whether your ambiance, music, and decorations match
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Easy access to the menus and staff
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Good Hospitality, friendliness of the staff
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Enticing items on the menu
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Reasonable Pricing
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Prompt service
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Good quality food, well-prepared and tasty
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Staff behavior
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Live music
And the list can go on. These are just a few items we have listed here. Now, framing the right restaurant marketing survey questions can help you gain deep insights into what needs to be tweaked to provide the best experience to your customers.
3. Building Customer Trust & Loyalty
What’s the best way to earn your customers’ trust? Make them feel valued. Taking their feedback and making changes based on it can create trust in your brand in their hearts. It is important to conduct a restaurant marketing survey. But it is even more important to work on the feedback and make the necessary changes. When customers return and find that you have incorporated their suggestions, it can foster a sense of loyalty in them and make them regular visitors.
4. Staying Competitive
Running a successful restaurant is a highly challenging and competitive endeavor. Staying ahead of the curve can be a vital tool for sustaining longer and growing faster. Restaurant marketing surveys are your guiding light on industry trends and customer preferences. If you have the right information at the right time, you can act on it faster than your competitors and gain an advantage over them.
5. Avoiding Bad Publicity
You must have heard the phrase, “Any publicity is good publicity.” Right? Wrong! For a restaurant, the biggest advertising medium is word of mouth. Customers who have had a good experience at your restaurant will share good opinions with their friends and relatives, which can increase your sales significantly. You can avoid bad publicity by asking your customer’s restaurant marketing survey questions and implementing their suggestions.
6. Achieving Faster Sales Growth
If you can provide an enriching experience to your customers, more people will inevitably hear about your restaurant, leading to skyrocketing sales. The best tool for achieving faster growth in your restaurant business is to conduct restaurant marketing surveys regularly.
7. Attracting Better Online Reviews
Source – https://www.larksuite.com/en_us/blog/restaurant-survey-questions-lark
You must have seen instances where annoyed customers write harsh online reviews about their bad experiences at a restaurant. Whether there is truth in their comments or not is a separate issue, but you can avoid such embarrassing situations by making your customers feel special. Asking them about their likings and preferences will give them a sense of belonging, creating a personalized bond. This can help you gain good reviews online.
Types of Restaurant Marketing Surveys
Before you start preparing your restaurant marketing survey questions, you should know the types of surveys you can conduct. Here’s a list of the types of surveys you can design:
1. In-Store Surveys
Source – https://davemortach.wordpress.com/2023/06/15/40-essential-restaurant-survey-questions/
When you survey your customers while they are on your restaurant’s premises, it is called an in-store survey. You can use any of the following methods for this survey:
Place a paper questionnaire on the customer’s table
Place a tablet on their table containing the survey questionnaire
Employ one of your staff members to converse subtly with the customers and figure out their opinion
Deploy a separate counter for customers to leave reviews.
2. Online Surveys
Source – https://www.startquestion.com/blog/creating-a-qr-code-survey-easy-guide/
If you don’t want to disturb your customers while they are dining, you can design an online restaurant marketing survey. Instead of nagging them at the restaurant, you can ask them to fill out the questionnaire in their leisure time by using the following methods:
Send the questionnaire via Email
Share the link to your questionnaire on Social Media
Display a QR code on the dining tables physically that leads to your questionnaire
Ask your customers to fill out the questionnaire on your website or app
3. Post Purchase Surveys
These surveys are typically conducted after the customers have completed dining. These can be performed similarly to the in-store survey. The most significant plus point of conducting the restaurant marketing survey after dining is complete is that you can get insights into the customers’ overall dining experience. Once you get feedback on everything from beginning to end, you can implement your strategies more effectively.
4. Mystery Shopper Surveys
This is another effective restaurant marketing survey method. As the owner, you can hire a mystery customer to visit your restaurant without the prior knowledge of your staff. This mystery customer can operate as your confidant and provide unbiased feedback on various aspects, like the service, ambiance, hospitality, food quality, etc.
What Should Your Restaurant Marketing Survey Questions Focus on?
Having learned about the types of surveys you can conduct in your restaurant, you should understand the best marketing research questions for restaurants. Once you crack this, you can design the best survey to help you gain insights into your customer preferences. Here are the key areas your questions should focus on:
1. Food Quality
Source – https://www.globaeroshop.com/
The quality of food is the heart of any restaurant. It is important to understand how customers perceive the taste and presentation of your dishes. Hence, you must include questions related to food in your survey.
2. Quality of Service
Source – https://www.restaurant-hospitality.com/
You can enhance the dining experience of your customers by providing excellent service. Assessing your staff’s performance by surveying your customers and giving them incentives for good customer reviews can motivate them to maintain high service standards.
3. Ambiance
Source – https://www.tacosandbeerlv.com
The atmosphere of your restaurant plays a significant role in customer satisfaction. A restaurant marketing survey can help you gather feedback on the ambiance and create a welcoming environment for the customers.
4. Cleanliness
Source – https://restaurantsystemspro.net/4-steps-to-a-clean-restaurant-that-stays-clean/
Cleanliness is a non-negotiable feature. It is a no-brainer that customers prefer cleaner restaurants. Adding restaurant marketing survey questions about cleanliness can help you understand how your customers rate the cleanliness of your restaurant. You can add more checks to keep the hygiene standards consistently high.
5. Value for Money
Source – https://business.getonbloc.com/restaurant-customer-service/
If you want to retain customers, they must get value for their money. Adding questions about the value they are getting from your restaurant can help build trust among them. They will feel that you care about their experience, while you can get insights into the tweaks your restaurant needs.
A Comprehensive Guide to Conduct Restaurant Marketing Survey
Now that you have understood the importance of restaurant marketing surveys and what you should focus on while creating your restaurant marketing survey questions, it is time to go further.
This section discusses how you can create the best restaurant survey for collecting customer feedback.
Part 1: Setting Up Your Survey
The first step is to set up the survey. For this, you should be clear about what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it. Let’s take a closer look:
Purpose and Goals
Before starting, it is important to define your goals. What do you want to achieve with your surveys? Here are the common goals all restaurants should have:
To improve your services
Making changes to your menu
Tweaking your restaurant’s ambiance
Provide satisfactory services and value for money
Increasing customer retention
Knowing your goals firsthand will help you create effective restaurant marketing survey questions.
Choosing the Right Tools
You can find several tools to create and distribute your survey online. Some of the popular digital platforms to set up and analyze the results of your surveys are:
SurveyMonkey
Google Forms
Typeform
You can use the templates available on these tools and customize them to suit your needs.
Craft Effective Survey Questions
Follow these principles to craft the most effective restaurant marketing survey questions:
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Ask both open-ended questions (provide a detailed response) and closed-ended questions (which are easier for customers).
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Keep the surveys short and simple. This will encourage more customers to give feedback and allow them to understand it fully.
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Include specific questions in your survey. As a result, you will get more actionable feedback.
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Allow customers to rate their experience using a Likert scale. In this way, you can analyze the results better.
Part 2: Core Survey Categories
The second step is to define the categories of your restaurant’s services for which you want to ask restaurant marketing survey questions. To identify these categories, you should see what services directly or indirectly add value to your customers. Here are some suggestions:
Food and Beverage Feedback
Source – https://estilo-tendances.com/5-exotic-foods-need-try/x
You would agree to the fact that food is the heart of a restaurant. Hence, it is important to ensure that your customers are satisfied with the food that you serve. Asking specific questions about meal satisfaction, the variety offered on the menu, etc. will make your restaurant marketing survey effective. Here are examples of some points you can focus on while asking your customers questions:
The ratings they want to give for the meal you serve them on the basis of:
Taste of the food
Quality of ingredients used
Presentation of the food items
Hygiene of the food and service
Whether the meal options on the menu were diverse and appealing
Are they satisfied with the meals served to them?
Do they feel like they have received adequate value for the money they were charged?
Customer suggestions for improving the dishes
Ask for any favorite recipe they would like to add to your menu
Service Quality
If you want to provide a positive dining experience to your customers, it is crucial to focus on the quality of your service. Adding service-related questions to your restaurant marketing survey can help you evaluate the performance, speed, and overall response of your servers.
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Is the behavior of your staff friendly as per the customers?
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Are the staff members prompt in taking the orders?
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Is the speed of service satisfactory to the customers?
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Any suggestions for improvement
Frame your questions well to receive constructive feedback on the efficiency and interaction of your staff with the customers.
Ambiance and Environment
Source – https://blog-us.lantmannen-unibake.com
Certain places give just the right kind of vibe, don’t they? Customers love to flock to restaurants that can create the perfect ambiance and environment to enrich the dining experience. Ask restaurant marketing survey questions that are related to ambiance to gauge what sets the tone for your customers. Here are some examples:
Ask for a description of the atmosphere of the dining area
How would they rate the cleanliness of the restaurant?
Was the seating comfortable?
Whether the music was soothing or too loud
Did the music and decoration go together?
What upgrades does the customer suggest?
Implementing all these suggestions and making tweaks wherever necessary will help you create a welcoming environment and attract more customers.
Pricing and Value
Source – https://www.zilliondesigns.com/
Mostly, customers like to visit a restaurant that offers value for their money. Overpriced restaurants are not affordable and are less likely to see bigger footfalls. Try to understand how customers perceive your restaurant’s offerings by asking restaurant marketing survey questions about the following:
Was the meal served worth the value of the customer’s money?
What does the customer feel about the quantity of the servings?
Is your restaurant charging fair value for the food offered?
Suggestions to optimize customer satisfaction by charging adequate prices
Always remember, your competitors are going to benefit if you overprice your food. To ensure that your restaurant maintains fair and competitive pricing, add these questions to your survey.
Part 3: Enhancing Customer Experience
Who doesn’t like some special treatment and extra service? Customers highly value additional care and offers provided by the staff. Paying attention to these needs can help you convert a one-time visitor into a permanent customer. In this step, you should develop your restaurant marketing survey questions around the services that enhance customer experience.
Customer Loyalty and Retention
Restaurants must focus on loyal customers as they are the backbone. Identifying them and ensuring they are satisfied will earn extra brownie points for your restaurant. Add questions to include their views in your restaurant marketing survey. This will help you measure their willingness to visit again and refer to your restaurant. Ask these questions:
Will they visit your restaurant again?
How likely are they to refer your restaurant to their friends and family?
Do they like your loyalty plans?
Have they benefited from the loyalty and referral benefits of your restaurant?
Suggestions they want to give to improve your customer loyalty.
There is a highly potent tool for calculating customer loyalty. It is called Net Promoter Score (NPS). Here’s how it works.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
What is NPS?
It is a tool for gathering feedback from your customers, identifying those who are most likely to visit again, and recommending your restaurant to others.
How is it calculated?
After your customers have experienced your restaurant’s hospitality, you must ask a simple question: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend us?” Add this question to your restaurant marketing survey.
How to interpret NPS?
Your NPS score divides your customers into three categories:
Promoters: Those customers who have rated your restaurant 9 or higher. They are most likely to return and even promote your restaurant among friends and family.
Passive: Customers giving you a rating between 7 to 8 fall into this category. They will most likely visit your restaurant again, but will not promote it actively.
Detractors: This group includes the customers who have rated you 6 or below. Such customers are not likely to repeat. In fact, they can actively promote the shortcomings of your restaurant among their friends and relatives.
Once you know this matrix, you can focus more on the promoters and passive customers to enhance your footfall. Make changes as per their suggestions so that they keep coming to your restaurant. By following this strategy, you will slowly improve your image with the detractors as well.
Special Needs and Accommodation
Your staff should be trained to attend the specially-abled customers. The facilities should support their movement around the campus freely. If possible, you can provide the service of a wheelchair to elderly people, making it easier for them to access the premises. With these facilities in place, specially-abled customers will feel more comfortable and convenient around your restaurant. To know whether your restaurant meets these or not, add the following to your restaurant marketing survey questions:
Did your staff provide the necessary attention to specially-abled customers when they required it?
Could they access your premises without any inconvenience?
Was the staff prompt to respond in case of an emergency?
Suggestions to improve the service
Part 4: Advanced Insights
When you design a survey, it is possible that you are likely to think only from your point of view and miss out on key details that your customers notice. Hence, you should include open-ended questions in your restaurant marketing survey.
Open-Ended Questions
As the name suggests, open-ended questions are the ones that don’t have any specific answer. It gives customers the chance to speak about what’s on their minds. The diverse and detailed feedback you can get this way can prove to be very insightful. Here are the types of questions you can include:
What impressed you the most about our restaurant?
How was your experience at our restaurant?
Do you have any suggestions for us?
What food and services can we improve on?
Use the Feedback Constructively
The feedback from open-ended restaurant marketing survey questions can be diverse and surprising. Thus, you should not react and try to understand what the customer emphasizes. Implementing changes to your restaurant through this feedback can be game-changing.
Part 5: Best Practices for Survey Deployment
Once you have completed preparing your restaurant marketing survey questions, you should follow these best practices when conducting the research.
Time Your Survey Properly
Getting the time of your survey right is everything. You should send the restaurant surveys to the customers as they complete their food. At this point, the experiences are fresh in their minds, and they have some time before the bill is presented for payment.
Give Incentives to the Participants
If you offer incentives for participating in your restaurant marketing survey, it will encourage more guests to participate. You can offer discount coupons, loyalty points, or free items to take the survey.
Pledge Confidentiality
Confidentiality is a crucial ingredient. It can attract more customers to give feedback in the survey. Assure them that you won’t share their responses publicly.
Train Your Staff
Train your staff to encourage customers to participate in the survey. Also, make them understand the importance of the survey and implement its suggestions.
Keep Improving Continuously
You should conduct regular surveys at your restaurant. But, it is more important to implement the suggestions to enhance the customer experience.
Analyze the Survey Results
Organize the Data: Analyze and organize the data you collect from the survey using software.
Identify Trends: If there is a pattern or a trend, i.e., many customers point out the same issue, you should prioritize it.
Use Data for making decisions: Use the feedback and make improvements that align with your customer’s expectations.
Take Follow-up Actions
Respond to the Customer: Acknowledge that you have received feedback. This can make them feel valued.
Implement Changes: Make changes according to the patterns and trends you have identified by analyzing the data.
Monitor the Progress: Once you have made the changes, conduct the survey again to see if your customers are satisfied with the changes.
To Sum it Up
Using the invaluable tool of restaurant marketing surveys, you can improve your customer experience. Take the honest feedback from your customers and make improvements in line with their expectations. This way, you can make them feel valued while ensuring they revisit your restaurant. Asking the right market research questions and right restaurant survey questions helps you gather essential customer insights and understand dietary restrictions. Additionally, focusing on when the food arrive and providing an exceptional customer experience are crucial aspects. These market research questions ensure that you can continuously enhance your services.
Design the restaurant marketing survey questions to track the response to your food, service, ambiance, and value for money. Make regular improvements to your Mantra!
Frequently Asked Questions
There is no one set pattern to suit everyone. Ideally, a restaurant marketing survey should contain enough questions to cover all important questions. Usually, 10-15 questions are considered to be enough.
Follow these steps to create the perfect restaurant marketing survey:
- Set your goals and keep them in mind
- Use software and tools to design the survey
- Create a diverse set of questions
- Run a pilot to test if it’s working
- Conduct the survey
- Organize the data received
- Analyze the results
- Make necessary improvements
Here are the basic points that you should include while designing a restaurant marketing survey:
- Identify your target market
- Identify their needs and preferences
- What are their most visited places?
- At what point do they decide to buy an item?
- Reason for choosing your restaurant
- What do they think about your brand?
- Understand their spending habits
A questionnaire is a set of restaurant marketing survey questions you ask your customers to gather their feedback. They can cover questions related to the food, service, accessibility, ambiance, etc.
You can include the following points in your questions:
- Ask about their overall experience
- Did they like the food?
- Was the service satisfactory?
Here are some of the questions you can use for food in your restaurant marketing survey:
- What ratings will you give for the taste of our food?
- Did you find your food to be at the right temperature?
- Were the portion sizes appropriate?
You can include the following key questions in your survey:
- Rate your overall experience (you can use a Likert Scale)
- Will you visit us again?
- What ratings will you give for your meal?
- Are you satisfied with our service? (Rating Scale)
- What would you suggest to us for making improvements?
