A little known secret about doing customer satisfaction surveys and getting the proper feedback instantly for 
improvements is to do mobile text surveys.
Do you remember a day in your restaurant especially during the busy weekends where things didn’t go well as planned? May be the customer didn’t like service that he got from one of your servers or may be the quality of the food was not so good as expected.
The big question is how do we find out that critical information from your customers so you can correct those mistakes and avoid them from happening again. In this competitive restaurant market there is no space for any restaurants that keeps making the same mistakes on quality of food or service and still survive let alone be profitable.
Big chain restaurants have their survey done via email or 800 number. They can do it because they have big budgets. But for most of the smaller restaurants there is no system in place to get customers’ feedback. May be it’s the belief that it’s expensive therefore very few restaurants do surveys. Most of the times it’s just due to the lack of information. The reality it that there are some affordable system that any small restaurant can use to get the proper feedback and suggestions from their customers.
Though it seems difficult to do surveys, they can be done easily and you can get the response right away . One of the easiest ways to do is via text messages. The nice thing about doing it via text rather than email or postal mail is that it is instantaneous. People are more receptive to text survey because they are short and quick. Since the phone is right on their hand,if you persuade them, chances are that they are gonna respond to your text survey while they are in the restaurant right before they sign their final check. The experience is still fresh in their mind and the feedback will be more accurate.
The idea is to offer an incentive like 20% offer on your next visit for doing a customer satisfaction survey via text. You can have a sign up form which says something like “text your name to 404-894-897X and answer 5 quick questions for free dessert next time.” The server will hand it with the final check with proper explanation. The goal here is to persuade the customers to do a survey via text as he is getting ready to sign the check and before leaving the restaurant while he or she is still in the restaurant.
The key to make them do the survey depends upon few important things that you should do. There are few do’s and don’ts for writing an effective survey.
A great survey will provide you with the right feedbacks and opinions from your customers that you can directly apply to improve your restaurant business. A poor survey may or may not generate many responses and thus the survey might be useless and just a waste of your time and money.
Here are a few do’s and don’ts for writing surveys.
DO: Make sure you have goals before writing questions
A survey should have a simple, concise goal in mind before anything else.
A good example, is question like “Do you like the quality of food in our restaurant ?” and the answer with numbers 0 being bad and 10 being excellent.
A bad example is “What do you think about our restaurant” It’s too general, too broad and has too many open ends.
DON’T: Use many open-ended questions
Open ended questions might seem right initially since it can give you tons of information. But the problem with this strategy is that it takes more effort and time for your customers to answer. So the end result is that they give up in the middle or avoid in the first place. The key is to make it short and easy so that the survey can quickly done in less than a minute.Instead of making them respond long answers if you can create questions and have them answer in scale of 1-10, you’ll have more success.
DO: Keep it short and simple
If you keep your survey short you have a greater chance that people will complete your survey. If your survey is long, people will often abandon the survey before finishing.
If your survey is long, people will just scan the survey. After finding it too long it triggers psychologically in their mind that it’s too much work to even get started.
Cut out as many questions as you can. Be specific on what you exactly want to find out with the right questions.
DON’T: Start with difficult questions
Try to place the interesting easy to answer questions first. This will intrigue them into a mood of answering the survey. Once you get them into that flow motion they are more likely to finish it also.
Try to avoid boring questions. However if you have some complicated questions you should reserve them for the end of the survey. Doing this, there is greater probability that they’ll likely answer them any way since they’re about to finish the survey.
DO: Offer free give away offer, discounts, prize or incentive
There should be some kind of incentive or prize for the time and effort they are putting to complete the survey. With out some sort of prize they are not motivated at all. Run a contest. For example, run free food give away surveys, where one survey winner will win a certain food items..
You can also give away free appetizer or discounts to everyone who answers a survey. That way, they feel that they are rewarded for their time. This will motivate them to fill out the survey, knowing that they’ll get something out of it.
DON’T: Use complicated or technical language
Use simple language without any technical terminology that is easy to answer. Try to use short words instead of long words.
In other words, aim to make your survey so easy and simple that a ten-year-old could answer it.
I hope when ever you decide to do a survey among your customers you’ll follow the above do’s and don’ts. This will get you the right feedbacks that’ll indeed help you improve the quality to become a better restaurant. Have you ever conducted a survey for your restaurant or competed a survey for other restaurants. Please share your thoughts what you think about conducting a good surveys and how it has helped your restaurant.
