July 4, 2025
Guest feedback through surveys is one of the most valuable tools for growing your restaurant. It doesn’t matter if you’re running a cozy café, a busy bistro, or a fine dining spot; knowing what your guests think can help you fine-tune everything from your service to your menu.
Yet, studies show that only 4% of dissatisfied customers ever share their complaints. Meaning most businesses are left in the dark about what’s not working and where improvements are needed.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the most effective survey questions to ask so you can gather insights that actually move the needle. These survey questions will help you get closer to what matters most: your dedicated patrons.
A well-designed survey helps you move beyond surface-level opinions by providing actionable insights to make informed decisions across your restaurant. It turns everyday guest input into a powerful tool for improving service, boosting satisfaction, and driving long-term growth:
When used consistently, surveys can become one of your most reliable tools for continuous improvement. So, let’s see how to structure it in a way that's clear, focused, and easy for guests to complete.
Structure your restaurant survey in a way that’s simple for guests to complete and easy for you to analyze. A good survey respects your guests’ time while still collecting the insights you need to make meaningful improvements.
Most guests are happy to answer a few quick questions, especially right after a visit. Aim for 5–10 questions total. A shorter survey can increase your response rate without sacrificing quality, especially when each question serves a clear purpose.
Use a combination of multiple-choice, scaled (e.g., 1–5 or 1–10), closed-ended questions, and open-ended questions:
Structure your questions in the same order as a guest experiences your restaurant.
This flow makes the survey feel intuitive and helps them recall details more easily.
Wrap up your survey with an open-ended prompt like “Anything else you'd like us to know?” It shows you care about hearing more than just ratings and often leads to your most honest feedback.
With the structure in place, the next step is selecting the right questions. Below, we’ll break them down by category, so you can choose the ones that best fit your restaurant’s goals and guest experience.
Start your survey with broad questions that capture how guests felt about their entire visit. These responses set the stage for deeper insights and help you gauge general satisfaction at a glance.
Recommended Questions:
A 1–5 or 1–10 scale works well here. It provides a baseline for tracking trends over time.
This open-ended question highlights your strengths, be it the service, food, ambiance, or something unexpected.
Constructive feedback can lead directly to improvements, especially when patterns emerge across multiple guests.
This is your Net Promoter Score (NPS) question. It’s a powerful metric for customer loyalty and long-term growth.
These questions not only provide a high-level view of guest satisfaction but also help identify recurring strengths and weaknesses that impact your reputation.
Once you’ve captured the overall experience, it’s helpful to understand who your guests are and how they found their way to your restaurant.
Understanding who your guests are adds valuable context to their feedback. These questions help you identify trends in guest behavior, discover which marketing efforts are working, and tailor experiences to different customer groups.
Recommended Questions:
Distinguish between first-time visitors and loyal guests. This can help you evaluate how well you're converting newcomers into regulars.
Offer options like Google, social media, word of mouth, online delivery apps, or walk-by traffic. This data can inform your marketing strategy and spending.
Answers like “first time,” “once a month,” or “weekly” help you segment casual guests from frequent diners and assess loyalty.
Helpful for service planning and understanding group dynamics (e.g., date nights, family dinners, business lunches).
Useful for understanding your local reach versus tourist draw. Responses can inform location strategy or advertising radius.
If appropriate for your brand, use broad age ranges. This helps tailor your menu, music, and marketing tone to your audience.
These questions may seem simple, but the insights they unlock can lead to smarter business decisions, from promotions and partnerships to menu design and staffing.
While general questions provide helpful background, the real heart of the dining experience lies in what’s on the plate. The next set of questions focuses on what’s on your menu and how your guests enjoyed it (or didn’t).
Food is often the main reason guests walk through your doors and the first thing they’ll remember when deciding whether to return. Asking the right questions about your food and drink helps you identify what’s working, what’s not, and where small tweaks could make a big impact.
Recommended Questions:
This encompasses taste, texture, freshness, and temperature in a single comprehensive yet valuable score.
Striking the right balance between too little and too much is key to value perception.
Visual appeal can significantly enhance the dining experience, particularly in the era of social media sharing.
Important for guests with allergies, vegetarian/vegan diets, or gluten intolerance. Shows you care about inclusivity.
A simple detail that can make or break satisfaction, especially for hot dishes, cold desserts, and beverages.
Great for spotting crowd-pleasers you may want to highlight or promote.
An open-ended question that invites thoughtful, constructive feedback.
Tracking these responses over time can help you refine your menu, spotlight your top items, and ensure consistency across shifts and locations.
Of course, great food is only part of the equation. The way your guests are treated, from the moment they arrive to the time they leave, can have a big impact on their experience.
Even the best meal can fall flat if the service doesn’t measure up. Friendly, attentive, and efficient staff play a huge role in shaping how guests perceive your restaurant. These questions help you assess how well your team is meeting expectations and identify areas where there may be room for improvement.
Recommended Questions:
A warm welcome can set the tone for the entire visit.
Helps assess staff engagement without micromanaging.
This speaks to staff training and their ability to make recommendations or handle dietary questions.
Timeliness is critical to guest satisfaction, especially during busy hours.
Manager or staff touchpoints show guests you care beyond just taking their order.
Mistakes happen, but tracking accuracy can reveal training or process issues.
A simple summary score to compare across days, shifts, or team members.
This invites guests to highlight great service without sounding like a formal request for recognition. It also maintains a warm and guest-focused tone.
Well-trained, guest-focused staff are one of your most valuable assets. The answers to these questions highlight gaps in service, reinforce good hospitality, and boost team morale.
Service sets the tone, but the setting completes the experience. The ambiance, cleanliness, and overall atmosphere of your space influence how relaxed and comfortable guests feel throughout their visit.
The way your restaurant looks, sounds, and feels has a direct impact on how guests enjoy their meal. Cleanliness, lighting, noise levels, and even the bathroom experience can enhance or distract from an otherwise great visit.
Asking the right questions about your space helps you ensure every detail supports a positive dining experience.
Recommended Questions:
Covers lighting, music, décor, and overall ambiance.
Cleanliness is one of the most important (and expected) parts of a quality dining experience.
Comfort matters, especially when enjoying longer meals or dining with a group.
This helps you balance energy with conversation-friendly acoustics.
A detail that can leave a big impression, positive or negative.
Open-ended, inviting feedback on things you might not notice yourself, like temperature, odors, or lighting.
These questions go beyond surface-level feedback. They help you identify overlooked details that can elevate the overall guest experience and increase repeat visits.
Beyond food and ambiance, the ease and efficiency of getting a table can shape first impressions. Be it walk-ins or advanced bookings, the experience before being seated is just as important as what happens at the table.
A smooth arrival sets the stage for a relaxed and enjoyable meal. The way your team handles wait times, check-ins, and seating can impact everything that follows. These questions help uncover any friction in the process and highlight where your front-of-house team shines.
Recommended Questions:
This helps segment responses and evaluate both processes separately.
Useful for identifying issues with phone, app, or online booking systems.
Delays can occur, but repeated issues may indicate overbooking or understaffing.
Helps you track perceived vs. actual wait times and spot peak-hour patterns.
Setting the right expectations is often more important than the wait itself.
A good catch-all question to assess host performance and efficiency.
Small gestures, such as offering water or providing status updates, can make a significant difference during delays.
By collecting feedback on your reservation and queue process, you can make adjustments that improve first impressions and guest flow, especially during busy periods.
However, not every dining experience happens at the table. For guests who order takeout or delivery, convenience, packaging, and accuracy matter just as much as taste.
When guests order from home, they’re still trusting your restaurant to deliver quality. Packaging, timing, and accuracy all influence how your food is received outside the dining room. These questions help you assess whether your off-site experience meets expectations.
Recommended Questions:
Timeliness is crucial, and late deliveries can ruin even the best meals.
A simple way to spot recurring issues with missing or incorrect items.
Sturdy, labeled packaging helps preserve quality and presentation.
Important for both delivery and takeout, especially for hot meals or delicate items.
Helps track performance across delivery platforms (e.g., DoorDash, Uber Eats, direct website).
Identify friction in the ordering process, whether through an app, website, or phone call.
A summary rating that brings it all together.
Collecting feedback here helps you maintain high standards across every order, ensuring guests enjoy your food, wherever they are.
Beyond a single visit or order, it’s important to understand how connected guests feel to your brand. So, these next batch of questions help you understand how close your guests are to becoming loyal customers.
Guest feedback isn’t just about what happened; it’s also about what happens next. These questions help you gauge how likely guests are to return, join your loyalty program, or engage with your brand beyond a single visit.
Recommended Questions:
A strong indicator of long-term loyalty and overall satisfaction.
Great for gauging interest and growing your repeat customer base.
Helps you track how well you’re staying connected with your audience.
A simple way to grow your opt-in list for marketing efforts.
Open-ended feedback that can spark ideas for offers, events, or menu additions.
These questions turn feedback into opportunity, helping you not just fix problems, but build lasting relationships with your guests.
To wrap up your survey, it’s essential to provide guests with an opportunity to share any thoughts or ideas you may not have asked about. Sometimes, the most valuable feedback comes in their own words.
Open-ended prompts give your guests the freedom to share detailed thoughts, unique experiences, and creative ideas. These responses often reveal insights you might not have considered and can highlight unexpected opportunities or concerns.
Recommended Questions:
Encourages constructive feedback in the guest’s own words.
Highlights your strengths from the guest’s perspective.
Invites guests to become part of your restaurant’s evolution.
A catch-all prompt that ensures no thoughts are left unsaid.
Including these open-ended questions can provide rich, qualitative insights that numbers alone cannot capture, offering a deeper look into guest sentiment and expectations.
However, to elicit meaningful responses, it’s equally important to choose the right moment and channel for collecting feedback from your guests.
There’s no shortage of ways to gather guest feedback; you just need to pick the channels that best fit your service model and customer flow. Whether guests are dining in, grabbing takeout, or ordering online, meeting them where they are increases your chances of getting thoughtful responses.
Here are some smart ways to collect feedback from your guests:
Choose the channels that align with your operations, and make the feedback process as smooth and inviting as possible. The easier it is to respond, the more insights you’ll gain.
But gathering feedback is only half the battle. To make it truly meaningful, you must take action. So up next, let’s look at a few practical tips to help you implement what you’ve learned and turn responses into real improvements.
Feedback is only as good as how effectively you decide to use it. Spotting trends or responding to individual concerns with a thoughtful approach can strengthen your operations and build lasting guest loyalty.
Here are some tips to help you along:
By turning insights into action, you can continuously improve the guest experience and create a restaurant people love coming back to.
To make collecting and acting on feedback even easier, iOrders helps you turn guest input into real improvements that enhance the dining experience.
iOrders helps restaurants grow in a digital-first world without compromising control or margins. From gathering feedback to powering online orders, iOrders gives you the tools to run smarter, deliver better guest experiences, and drive long-term loyalty.
Here’s what iOrders offers:
With all these tools under one platform, iOrders makes it easier to run your restaurant efficiently, connect with your guests meaningfully, and grow your brand on your own terms. It's everything you need to stay competitive in today’s foodservice landscape.
Running a great restaurant means listening to your customers. Guest feedback gives you a direct line into what’s working, what needs improvement, and what keeps people coming back.
With iOrders, you get purpose-built tools to act on that feedback. Our automated review systems, loyalty programs, smart campaigns, and commission-free ordering are all designed to help you improve guest experience and grow your business with confidence.
Ready to see how it works? Book a demo with iOrders and discover how we can help your restaurant run more efficiently and serve customers better.
