How to Get Customer Feedback For Your Restaurant

Customer feedback is a crucial part of improving any restaurant's food and service experience. With clear feedback, you can identify your venue's shortcomings and strengthen what makes your business unique and popular with your diners.

However, many restaurants do not have a proactive approach to getting customer feedback consistently. This leads to limited data for improvement, and can negatively affect service quality and customer satisfaction.

In this guide, we’ll explain why customer feedback is so vital, and give you six ways to effectively gather customer feedback in your restaurant.

Why is customer feedback important in a restaurant?

Some of the major reasons customer feedback is important to a restaurant include:

• Building customer relationships: By consistently reaching out to customers to get their feedback, you are making your diners feel more appreciated and building more customer loyalty. Diners who feel more valued are also more likely to come back to your venue, as well as give more positive reviews.

• Identifying areas of improvement: With negative and positive feedback, you gain practical feedback on where your restaurant is strongest, which menu items and services are most popular and where your business needs improvement.

• Understanding your brand's reputation: By getting customer feedback, you can also learn more about what diners are telling others about your business. According to ResDiary’s Beyond the Booking hospitality industry report, around 68% of Australian and New Zealand-based respondents use recommendations from friends and family to determine where to dine out. In the UK and Ireland, 72% of diners use peer recommendations to find new restaurants.

Customer feedback can take on many forms, each offering unique insights and benefits:

• Surveys: Using surveys, you can directly request feedback on specific aspects of your business you would like further data on. Restaurant survey questions help you gain a wealth of feedback from your customers, including demographic data and their suggestions for your improvement.
  
  
• Online reviews: If many of your customers have found you from search engines or social media advertisements, requesting more online reviews can be crucial for building a positive online profile. According to the Beyond the Booking report, 60% of 18-34 year old respondents use social media and reviews to find new restaurants in the UK and Ireland. Getting positive customer feedback in the form of online reviews is therefore crucial.
  
  
• In-person feedback: In-person feedback is a reliable source of insight from your customers. With a few simple questions, you can gather feedback from just about every customer who enters your venue.

6 ways to get customer feedback in your restaurant

The more customer feedback you collect, the more data you have to improve your restaurant. Here are 6 ways to solicit feedback in your restaurant. 

1. In-person feedback

If you have put the right processes in place, gaining in-person feedback can be seriously valuable in your business. 

Some tactics you can use to encourage feedback include:

• Train your staff to ask customers directly about their dining experience at the point of sale.
• Hosting regular meetings for staff to share feedback that they have received regarding the venue.
• Using a note-taking system to record significant feedback, such as major complaints that repeatedly appear.

It may also be beneficial to have a suggestions or comments box as an additional way to get more feedback about your business from customers who may feel less comfortable giving it in person.

In-person feedback is valuable because of how frequently you can gather it. Everyone who enters your business has thoughts and feelings about it. By gathering in-person feedback, you ensure these insights aren’t wasted.

In-person feedback also enables you to have a dialogue. You can ask follow-up questions to get the most valuable feedback for you.

2. Tablets

Inconvenience often prevents customers from giving valuable feedback. Customers may have to log into their Google account or review platforms, go out of their way to write a note for a suggestion box or feel uncomfortable giving honest feedback directly to staff. 

By having a tablet for customer feedback on standby when your customers pay the bill, you can ensure quick and easy reviews for your business in a way that won’t inconvenience your diners or your front-of-house staff. These feedback systems can often be built into your POS system.

A tablet review also allows you to write your own survey questions to direct feedback. With exact questions, you can precisely confirm if multiple customers have the same pain points, and gain complete oversight over your business.

3. QR codes

QR codes can be placed around key points of your business to encourage dine-in guests to quickly scan them and fill out a feedback form. QR codes for feedback specifically should be separate from a menu code or other services, and they should be clearly labelled for convenience.

QR codes are a great way to encourage customer feedback. This gives more reserved guests a chance to provide feedback without the discomfort that might come with a face-to-face interaction. With anonymity, QR codes make it easier to gather genuine negative feedback and drive further improvement across your restaurant.

To encourage guests to scan in QR codes more often, you should consider offering incentives for giving reviews, such as gift vouchers and special deals. However, to use this tactic, you must ensure any incentives you offer do not contravene the rules of any review platforms that your QR code links to.

4. Post-dining follow-ups

By following up with your customers after dining, you are encouraging more reviews and building a better relationship with that customer at the same time. A follow-up message offers unique opportunities to engage with guests, encourage repeat business and develop a loyal customer base.

With ResDiary’s built-in email marketing features, you can automatically send follow up email messages to your customers immediately after they’ve dined. This helps you gather actionable feedback while the experience of your restaurant is still fresh in your diner’s minds.

With ResDiary’s Silverstreet integration, you can also send follow-up messages via text. Like other forms of feedback, these methods are a good opportunity to encourage feedback while offering incentives such as gift vouchers.

You can accompany your request for feedback with special deals to drive repeat business. You can easily offer these deals by incorporating ResDiary promotions in your email marketing.

By offering these deals in conjunction with a request for feedback, you show customers that you value their thoughts about your restaurant, and offer them a great-value opportunity to return to your business. In combination, it’s an excellent way to drive repeat business.

5. Customer interviews

Another way to get more customer feedback is through full sit-down interviews. These provide an opportunity to get extremely in-depth insights from your customers.

It’s important that you offer something to entice customers into spending the time and effort a longer interview will require. Incentives can include entering a draw for a reward, gift vouchers or merchandise. 

For a customer interview to be effective, it is important to select the right customers to speak to. Be sure you have a proper cross-section of your diners. Use your understanding of your restaurant demographics and booking data to find the guests with the right expertise.

If a customer has a history of providing genuine and helpful responses, both positive and negative, they could also be the perfect candidate for an interview.

You’ll also need to carefully prepare for customer interviews. Come up with a list of questions that will ensure you get the most valuable insights.

With customer relationship management solutions like Acteol and Nollie, as well as ResDiary’s built-in analytics suite, you can gather comprehensive data about your diners. This helps you find the right customers for these interviews quickly and easily.

6. Reviews and social media mentions

It’s important to monitor your reviews and social media mentions for further insights or points you can act on. It’s likely that customers have already shared plenty of feedback for you to explore. There are also plenty of benefits to driving more reviews for your restaurant.

Driving more social media reviews and interactions helps more customers find your business and can be vital to growing your online presence. Some ways to increase your brand’s online presence through reviews and social media are:

• Encouraging engagement: Your social media presence will stand out over your competitors if you are regularly engaging with past guests, influencers and other potential customers. Consider offering rewards for social media mentions of your business, like gift vouchers.

• Remaining active: Consistent updates and posts across your social media will help your profile stay fresh and in the spotlight. This encourages more diners to engage with you and helps your business stand out from the crowd. Create a release schedule as part of your marketing plan to stay consistent with your social media posts. 

• Responding to reviews: When audiences check your reviews, they will likely be looking for the most positive and negative reviews to see if your business is a good fit for them. By regularly responding to positive and negative feedback, you are showing viewers your brand is professional and that you are an active, modern business. 

With ResDiary’s Meta Integrations, you can maximise your social media campaigns and enable customers to book a reservation directly from Instagram or Facebook.

How to use customer feedback to improve your business

Once you have an overview of your customers’ feedback, it is time to apply it to your business. Take your weak points and find ways to improve on them.

With ResDiary’s table management software and quality integrations, you can improve your business for greater guest satisfaction by:

• Making reservations easier: ResDiary allows you to accept bookings seamlessly with automated reservation management. Plus, With ResDiary’s booking integrations, you can enable guests to book a table with you directly from Facebook, Instagram or Google. This encourages more bookings and reduces any friction in the booking process.

• Using integrated systems: Integrated systems allow you to improve your restaurant in a multitude of ways. For example, with integrated EPOS solutions like Access EPOS or PowerEPOS from Triniteq, you can take advantage of conveniences like automatic transferring of pre-payments. This allows you to offer a more seamless customer experience, increasing their satisfaction with your business.
  
  
• Streamlining your operations: ResDiary helps streamline your daily operations by automating time-consuming tasks, centralising your general information and replacing inefficient systems that could be affecting your staff effectiveness, like pen and paper booking diaries. This gives your staff more time to focus on your customer’s dining experience, which can help manage a wide range of critiques customers might have for your business.

Use ResDiary to improve your business with customer feedback

ResDiary’s integrated services give you the tools you need to transform your customers’ feedback into actionable data you can use to streamline your daily operations and gain more glowing reviews.

From gathering booking data to streamlining daily operations to give your staff more time to focus on customer experience, we can help you improve your business and encourage more positive reviews. 

Improve your business today by booking a demo with ResDiary.