Service to guests and their suggestions are of utmost importance in the hotel industry. 90% of customers consider customer service essential when determining which brands to purchase, per Microsoft’s Global State of Customer Service. It is your responsibility as a business owner to provide excellent service to your diners at all times. Using customer feedback forms at your restaurant is a great method to learn how your customers feel about the services you provide and how you can better them in the future.

With the proliferation of the internet and social media, more and more people are voicing their opinions in the open. Close to 36% of the population regularly offers their opinion freely on social media or other public forums. Direct feedback through your feedback form can accomplish wonders in a world with a constant rush of information and public feedback. Your restaurant’s marketing can be informed and improved by listening to its patrons’ opinions and suggestions. You can remain ahead of the competition by posting the comments you receive from clients directly on your social media accounts. In this article, we’ll go over some of the best practices and suggestions for creating a restaurant review survey.

What Goes Into A Customer Feedback Form?

There are several ways to format a customer feedback form and ask various questions. Most inquiries on customer comment cards are around

  1. Name, Email Address Phone Number
  2. Contact details such as phone numbers and email addresses.
  3. Dates of celebrations of special occasions like birthdays and anniversaries.
  4. Rating-related queries about a recent experience.
  5. Encourage comments, ideas, and critiques.

Criteria for Evaluating Customer Feedback

1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

It’s easy to gauge client happiness with a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). Simple inquiries like “how happy were you with the experience?” The survey questions can be answered by customers anywhere from 1 to 5. CSAT is calculated by taking the sum of all the yes answers and dividing it by the total number of answers and then multiplying that result by 100. The final tally is the proportion of your clientele who have expressed satisfaction with your services.

2. The Net Promoter Ratio (NPS)

Customer satisfaction, interest, and loyalty may all be measured by Net Promoter Scores (NPS). In this technique, you poll clients on their propensity to spread the word about your business. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) helps restaurants enhance their service, quality, and support. They are useful for monitoring repeat business and gauging long-term success. The higher the Net Promoter Score, the more devoted your client base is, and the more willing they are to promote your business to others.

It is possible to combine the findings of Customer Satisfaction and the New Product Testing techniques into a single form for collecting input from restaurant patrons.

Designing a Feedback Form for Restaurant Diners 

1. Knowing Your Customers’ Demographics

As a business owner, you should make it your top priority to learn as much as possible about your customer base. It’s a good idea to include demographic questions on your restaurant’s feedback form, such as age, location, and occupation. You can use this data to inform your marketing and strategy decisions.

2. Quantitative Data and Numbers

Insightful data can be gleaned by asking statistical inquiries. These inquiries have scaled response options. They can be asked how often they eat at your restaurant, how significant certain features are, and on what platform they would want to get regular updates, among other things. You may better match your firm with these trends by asking these statistical questions.

3. Food and service quality

Your main selling point is the food. As a result, the area of your restaurant’s customer feedback form in which you ask clients to rate the quality of your food and service is the most important. Asking questions like these might give you valuable insight into your clients’ perceptions of your products and services.

4. Inquiry Questions

In any kind of survey, the discovery questions are always the most interesting part. There are questions on there that can tell you everything from how the customer heard about your business to what they ordered. There are certain default options from which customers can pick.

5. Free-Form Comments

When gathering information, it is highly recommended that multiple-choice questions be preserved. However, a comment section is a crucial part of any feedback form. Keep an open-ended question at the conclusion so that clients can provide additional feedback.

6. Conversational Language

The wording used in a feedback form should reflect normal discourse. For honest responses, a feedback form should read like a chat with a friend. Complex words, industrial jargon, and abbreviations should be avoided. It’s important to maintain the form of feedback open so that communication may flow easily.

7. Brief and Simple

Despite its importance, a feedback form’s length and complexity should be kept to a minimum. Customers may become frustrated with a lengthy and difficult feedback form. Having a simple and brief form will boost the likelihood of attracting customers’ attention and generating responses. Use simple, clear language that is easily understood to speed up the process of answering each question. Before releasing your customer feedback form to the general public, make sure it has been thoroughly tested and is both brief and easy to fill out.

Working with various sorts of restaurants gives food service consultants a lot of experience in the culinary world and the hospitality sector. Because of this, they are the ideal mentors for prospective restaurateurs who want to build their businesses.