I’m sure we’re all familiar with customer surveys, especially since they are becoming more prevalent nowadays. Perhaps you were asked to fill out a survey after a recent hotel stay, or maybe after dealing with an online customer service department, either way, they have become a standard part of most business practices. The reason why surveys are common, and also so important, is that they are the quickest and most efficient way of getting helpful feedback about your business, and in turn, help you improve or change certain aspects and increase your success with customers.
Having a restaurant survey is an excellent way to gauge people’s opinions about your business and help you also improve in any and all areas. Let’s take a look at how you can conduct a restaurant survey and gain some valuable insight.
1. Type of Survey
First, you need to know the type of survey you will want to carry out; there are a variety of types such as brand awareness, job satisfaction, or a market research survey. The type you want for your restaurant survey is called a customer satisfaction survey, and as the name indicates, it will measure the satisfaction of all your restaurant diners.
2. Survey Questions
Next, you need to write the survey, for this, you need some great questions, the kind of questions that are concise and relevant.
For example, including a question like ‘how did you get here tonight?’, gives you completely useless information. Stick to questions such as ‘what could be improved with the decor?’; ‘Is there anything missing from the menu?’; ‘Were you happy with your server?’.
You should include around 10-15 survey questions – you can get a template of questions online if you need inspiration, or think about what type of questions you’d like to be asked if you were the customer.
3. Publish Survey Online
Once you have written your survey, now it’s time to publish, make sure you take advantage of every platform and avenue you can. Use your own social media, your restaurant’s social media, your website if you have one.
Also, you should send it through your base of customers, do not be afraid to follow-app them if you haven’t received the answer.
4. Share Survey
When you have published the survey questions on your own sources, you need to encourage others to share it for you so that you can reach as many people as possible. Perhaps include a call to action at the end of the survey questions asking customers to share it with their friends and on their social media pages. Send out a message on your socials, such as a post on Facebook or a tweet if you have Twitter. You need to get as many answers as possible to know everything about customer experience.
5. Analyze the Answers
You should leave your restaurant survey open and running for a few weeks, three the general rule, in order to gain as much restaurant feedback as possible. Once you have waited a few weeks and have a workable amount of answers, it’s time for you to look through all the answers, compare and analyze, and figure out what the customers are saying. What are the common responses? What are common requests? It may take a little time to go through them all, so prepare yourself to have some patience during the process.
6. Carry Out Changes
Once you’ve made it this far, you may be feeling a little overwhelmed which is completely understandable, but you are nearly at the finish line so don’t give up, because now is the most important part. You have analyzed the answers, collated the restaurant feedback, and it’s time to put into action people’s requests and recommendations. Perhaps it means you will have to change up your menu a bit, or you may even have to invest a little money in renovation parts of the business or changing the style, just don’t ignore any of the frequent restaurant feedback you may have received.
Whatever you have to do by way of changes to your restaurant as a result of the survey questions, just remember that it’ll all be worth it because these changes could make a huge difference to your business’ success and help not only keep the old customers loyal, but also attract a whole new set of long term customers.
