Customer experience
Restaurant feedback survey
Separate the food from the service from the wait, so a bad night points at a shift and not at the kitchen.
Why this survey gets sent
“Someone wrote that the food was cold and the service was slow. Which branch, which night, which table? By the time I ask, the shift that could have told me has gone home and nobody remembers the order.”
A restaurant is four businesses in one building — a kitchen, a dining room, a takeaway counter and a delivery operation — and a complaint that does not say which of them it belongs to cannot be acted on by anyone. Four extra seconds of the guest's time, spent on the kind of visit and the table number, is what turns a grumble into an instruction.
What is in it
- In the restaurant, takeaway or delivery? (single response)
- Branch, and the table or order number (short answers)
- Taste, temperature, portion, staff, cleanliness — one rating grid
- How long you waited for the food (bands of minutes)
- Was the price fair for what you received? (single response)
- How likely you are to come back (rating)
- What stood out, good or bad (long answer)
About 4 min to answer
Restaurant feedback survey
About 4 min
How to write this survey
Ask which kind of visit it was, first
Dine-in, takeaway and delivery share a kitchen and nothing else. Cold food in the dining room is a pass window that nobody is watching; cold food on a delivery is a packaging decision or a rider waiting in a car park. Put that question first and every answer after it changes meaning in a way the person reading the results can use.
It also tells you which questions to forgive. A delivery customer never saw the dining room, so a low mark for cleanliness from that person is noise rather than a signal — read the grid by visit type and not as one average. If most of your volume is delivery, that is an argument for a second, shorter survey aimed only at it, rather than for stretching this one to cover both.
Split the meal from the service
One grid, five rows, and every row owned by a different person: taste belongs to the chef, temperature to the pass, portion size to the recipe card, attentiveness to the floor manager, cleanliness to the closing shift. Written that way, a week of responses is a rota of conversations rather than a mood.
Never ask about two of them in one line. “Was the food good and served quickly?” has no honest answer for a guest who waited half an hour for something excellent, and the half they pick is the half you will act on by accident. Five labelled columns from poor to excellent, the same five every time, is all the scale a meal needs.
A wait is a fact — ask for it in minutes
“Was the wait acceptable?” measures the guest's patience, which you cannot change. Bands of minutes measure your kitchen, which you can. Offer four bands and an honest escape for the people who were talking and did not notice — their answer is not a complaint and should not be counted as one.
Bands also survive being remembered. Nobody recalls that the starters arrived in nineteen minutes, but almost everybody can place the evening in “ten to twenty” or “more than forty”, and a band you can trust beats a precise number you cannot. Keep the boundaries round and non-overlapping, and use the same ones all year so a slow month is visible without any arithmetic.
Price is a comparison, not a number
Asking whether the bill was too high produces a yes from almost everyone and tells you nothing. Asking whether the price was fair for what arrived puts the plate back in the frame, and the same amount of money gets two different answers depending on whether the portion was generous and the room was pleasant. That is the reading you want, because it is the one you can act on without discounting.
Read it beside the return question rather than alone. A guest who calls the price a little high and still says they will come back has told you the food is worth it; the same complaint from somebody who will not return is the one that should reach the owner. Two cheap questions, read together, are worth more than either of them read apart.
Catch them before they leave the table
A QR code on the bill folder or the table tent collects several times what an email sent the next day collects, and it arrives while the meal is still on the tongue. Keep the table or order number optional but ask for it — it is what lets a manager match a bad night to a shift, a server and a ticket, and it is the difference between an apology and a fix.
Print one code per branch rather than one for the whole chain. It costs nothing, it removes a question from the page, and it means the branch column in your results is never blank because somebody could not remember which road they were on. Leave the contact field last and optional, and use it only for the guests who asked to be called.