Learn how to prepare your survey properly to get valuable data
Get inspired by concrete questions to ask in your survey
Find out ways to share your survey with your customers
Get to know Survio’s features that save tons of your time
How to retain customers and succeed in gastronomy? What are the ways to intensify the dining experience of your guests? Is the menu of dishes attractive enough? There are many variables that can boost your business as well as cause serious trouble. Restaurant client feedback questionnaire template will help you avoid any mishaps and focus on aspects securing growth and profit.
The goal is to make sure your guests will keep coming repeatedly to your place and whenever possible, they will share positive references with others.
Benefits that you get by conducting a survey
First and foremost, you can use the questionnaire as a standard customer satisfaction evaluation tool. In particular, the focus of yours might be
quality of services,
professional attitude of your wait staff,
culinary craft of your cooks,
freshness and taste of served dishes,
overall impression of the dining facility and its atmosphere,
pricing.
Besides, surveys do help reveal other important facts that certainly contribute to a positive reputation of your facility and make customers loyal to your brand. Let’s list a few:
staff assessment to reward efficient employees and discover who could use a little training,
new hints and ideas to expand the scope of services and attract new diners,
prevent negative public reviews by receiving criticism within perimeter of your restaurant,
plan a series of events, based on seasonal attendance or local habits.
Surveying your clientele is a great opportunity to get valuable feedback - general as well as in-depth that sets your business goals and entrepreneur efforts. Detecting dissatisfaction in a survey causes much less harm to your business than an unflattering public review. Immediate reaction upon the survey evaluation prompts you to think of a proper remedy and start changing things in time. Keep reading to find out how easy it may get to create questionnaires and start collecting answers.
Find out why our customers choose Survio as a reliable feedback solution for their business.
Before you dive into creating a questionnaire, make sure you have figured out which area of your business you want to inspect and what information you require from your guests, i.e. respondents.
Facility related - indoor and outdoor: table settings, furnishings and decorations, baby-friendly environment, cleanness, comfort, atmosphere, access, parking.
To get started smoothly, Survio also offers ready-made and fully customizable survey templates for gastronomy and food service areas. Inspire yourself with customer satisfaction in fast food,café evaluation survey or hotel guest services evaluation survey. Create your own survey structure - one page, more pages, and arrange it until it gets the shape you require. You don’t need any prior experience in conducting research.
The way you ask in surveys does matter - question types and formulations
A general rule says that the briefer and clearer your questions get, the more likely your respondents are to finish your survey, providing honest answers that reflect reality. Too elaborated, jargon specific or ambiguous questions are definitely not recommended as they might cause confusion.
Survio offers 19 question types. It’s up to you which types you make use of or how you spread them across the questionnaire. Always have in mind the purpose your survey is to follow. Set a logical sequence of the questions to guide the respondent smoothly through the survey from start to finish.
Here are examples of the most used types of questions to give you a bit of inspiration:
star rating - looks great visually, is intuitive and easy to answer,
single choice question - the most frequent, works perfectly when asking for clients’ preference,
text answer - goes beyond the list of suggested answers, provides new tips and ideas,
matrix question - comes in handy when more items is to be evaluated by the same metrics,
Note: Open-ended questions need to be assessed manually as they contain subjective opinions of the respondents. This, however, represents a genuine value for your decision-making in terms of further business development and implementation of useful tips and suggestions.
Get feedback easily - use a variety of distribution channels
Survio offers a number of ways to share your survey and collect responses. Feel free to choose a single distribution channel, combine more or use all of them altogether. Always remember to preview the questionnaire. Make sure that it’s complete and doesn’t contain any redundant information. Watch for typos and test the survey prior to sending it off.
Sharing survey on social media
Visitors and guests of your restaurant who follow you on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.) can access the questionnaire via post you share with them directly from Survio. Premium subscription users of Survio are allowed to further edit the post. Add your own image related to the survey and customize the description to increase the response rate.
Displaying survey on your website
Assuming that your survey shall collect suggestions and ideas to improve your restaurant and its services, it is possible to place it on your website. It can be displayed in the following ways:
an Iframe - the questionnaire gets embedded in the website as its integral part. The code, which is generated in Survio, is simply pasted in the code of your website. Give it a try.
a pop-up window - the questionnaire “pops up” in a separate frame above a web page once it loads. Similarly to the Iframe, a code from Survio is inserted in the code of a particular web page. It is also possible to set a delay time for the pop-up window.
a pop-over widget - has a form of an interactive bubble unfolds from a tab on the right-hand side. It contains the questionnaire which can be directly filled out by visitors of your web site.
A QR code
The code stores a URL address of your survey in Survio. Guests scanning it with their smartphones open the questionnaire in a mobile browser where they can comfortably answer your questions. Make use of this strong call to action tool and engage regular guests as well as newcomers in your surveys hidden behind an array of black and white squares printed on weekly menus or directly on receipts).
Tip: if there’s a free WiFi network in your restaurant, display the questionnaire on the main page after your guests get connected to it.
Survey e-mail campaigns / invitations
In certain situations you might know contact e-mails of your diners - factory canteens and university cafeterias. Send an e-mail invitation to your employees or students to gather feedback on the quality of your services. Employees will feel engaged to see your intention of providing catering improvements. Students might be motivated knowing there’s a reward for them after they fill out your questionnaire - free lunch or meal voucher.
Tip: use the exit page (so-called thank-you page) to offer respondents a discount code once they submit the questionnaire or redirect your guests to your website and increase referrals.
Analysis of responses is effortless due to full automation
Survio’s greatest asset lies in its versatility. It contains a survey builder, multiple tools for survey distribution and powerful built-in analytics automatically processing responses into summary results as well as individual answers in real time.
Another feature that you will certainly appreciate is reporting. Project data in amazing dashboards that will speak to the audience in the most convenient and comprehensible way. Filter data according to a number of variables - answer, date, completion time, source etc. Export the output in a single click in the most common formats ( PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, CSV or Google Sheets) so that it fully fits the concept of your presentation or occasion the purpose of which your research needs to follow.
Read the messages from your audience right
Having all results nicely assembled, it is time to focus on interpretation of the answers your respondents have left you in order to come to appropriate conclusions. Let’s set an example:
As an executive manager of a dining facility, you’ve conducted a survey comprising:
A segmentation question to sort out regular and occasional diners.
Regular diners with previous experience with your place will presuppose more relevant feedback. Occasional diners have fresh eyes to spot opportunities you wouldn’t have thought of and can become a great source of inspiration and new ideas.
A single choice question focusing on overall satisfaction.
Summary results have shown that a major proportion of diners is satisfied with your services. But the goal of every business is to pass mediocrity, set yourself apart from your competition and make profit. That’s when you focus on individual answers to boost your strengths, discover the pain points and find remedies to it.
A single choice matrix taking particular points of your interest into account, such as food quality, price adequacy, waiting time, conveniences etc.
Let’s assume that your dishes are received with praise and so is the attitude of your wait staff. What if diners would appreciate a wider variety of the menu? Have a production meeting with the chef and kitchen staff to come up with ideas. Start adding new meals, try different cuisine in a weekly rotation, reach for vegetarian food, etc. The options are many, the decision will be yours.
Tip: Activate premium subscription to let Survio send you notifications directly in your e-mail whenever a survey is submitted. The message can also contain responses to particular questions to keep yourself in the picture of what your clientele requires.
The range of services seems sufficient, so does the capacity of your facility. However, you notice a demand for events or a supporting program. Knowing this, you can ask about the preferred nature of the events in a follow-up survey and arrange an evening with live music, a cook show, a stand-up comedy, soccer broadcast projection, or any other form of entertainment accordingly.
Virtually any change that you implement in your business can be an impulse for you to conduct a customer satisfaction survey to see how it works or doesn’t work.
an open-ended question for additional comments and suggestions.
Do not limit yourself to options you provide in close-ended questions. Always leave some space to include the “vox populi”. Let it broaden your horizons as to what or how you can make your business more appealing and sought-after, whether it be extension of the opening hours, change in interior decoration, or “buy 2, get 1 for free” special offer.
Tip: Work with feedback related to your wait staff to motivate and reward the most efficient employees. Introduce new benefits, enable promotion, increase loyalty and satisfaction.
A brief summary of key takeaways
Customers in gastronomy may get demanding at times. They are willing to pay extra money for services that meet or exceed their expectations. If the quality doesn’t match the price in their perspective, they leave dissatisfied. The braver will tell you without asking, the others usually take the complaints with them and spread it elsewhere.
pay attention to their evaluations and suggestions - as long as they are reasonable and reflect reality,
always tell your guests what the purpose of your survey is (they will be more likely to provide honest answers and submit the questionnaire in the end),
conduct your surveys via Survio repeatedly and compare results over a period of time,
any positive feedback can be proudly presented. Use it as a source of content for your website and social media.
Tip: questionnaires created in Survio can also work well as registration forms for attendees of a wine tasting event you are about to organize as a result of a website opinion poll. Read the use case How to Create an Event Planning Survey?
Let your diners know that you care about their opinion and strive for making each visit of theirs a unique experience. Once they become fans of your restaurant, pub, canteen, café, bar or a bistro, they will hardly leave for your competition and their reference will substitute another paid promotion channel. Get new impulses to evolve your business with Survio.