Ensuring customer satisfaction is essential for the success of any restaurant, whether it's a local neighborhood diner or a new online delivery service. To understand the needs and preferences of your customers, conducting customer surveys is one of the most effective tools to use.
In this article, we will discuss the importance of customer surveys for restaurants and provide best practices for using them for both in-person visits and digital orders placed for delivery.
Why are Customer Surveys Important?
- Collecting Valuable Feedback: Customer surveys provide a direct communication channel for customers to share their thoughts, opinions, and suggestions about their dining experience. This feedback is vital for improving service quality and menu offerings.
- Enhancing Customer Loyalty: When customers see that their feedback is valued and acted upon, they are more likely to become loyal patrons. This can lead to positive word-of-mouth recommendations and help turn guests into brand advocates.
- Adapting to Changing Tastes: Ensuring the satisfaction of guests is crucial, as it can lead to increased profits and customer retention. In fact, research shows that if only 5% of guests are repeat customers, it can generate in a revenue boost of up to 25%. Additionally, repeat customers tend to spend 67% more than first-timers. Therefore, it's important to prioritize customer satisfaction by analzying customer feedback and online reviews. Utilizing this feedback can play a vital role in improving your restaurant and ensuring that customers are happy and willing to return, as well as recommend your establishment to others.
Best Practices for Restaurant Surveys
- Ask the Right Questions: To gather valuable insights, it's essential to ask well-crafted questions. Restaurant Engine advises against asking questions that contain two or three parts and asking yes/no questions. It's recommended to ask open-ended, unbiased questions that are straightforward to understand. Furthermore, using a mix of rating scales and multiple-choice questions will increase the ease of response.
- Automation is Crucial: It is important to gather feedback as frequently as possible, and to be timely when doing so, whether from in-person visits or digital orders. To get the most accurate feedback, it's recommended to distribute surveys at the end of the meal when the experience is fresh in the customer's mind. In the case of digital orders, sending surveys at a set time shortly after delivery is a great way to capture their immediate impressions.
- Offer Incentives: Encourage survey participation by offering incentives such as: discounts on future visits, gift cards, or free menu items, and more.
- Leverage the Right Teck Stack: To make sure surveys reach the right consumers, restaurants can benefit from using a CRM platform that already has their customer data. This allows for better segmentation and optimization of survey communication. With Appfront, initiating surveys for customers who have made orders is easy, requiring only a few clicks. Messages can be personalized according to the customer's ordering preferences, location, and other factors. And when it comes to creating the surveys themselves, top-rate tools such as CViewSurvey, SurveyMonkey, and Typeform can help.
- Analyze and Act: Once you collect survey data, analyze it systematically. Identify trends and areas for improvement. Act on the feedback to show customers that their opinions matter.
In conclusion, customer surveys are a powerful tool for restaurants to gauge customer satisfaction, foster loyalty, and adapt to changing market dynamics. By following Appfront’s best practices and automating survey outreach according to visit frequency, order type, location, etc., you can gain valuable insights that will help your restaurant thrive.
