Most feedback forms we see in Indian restaurants ask too much and learn too little. Twenty questions, no scoring, and a stack of cards nobody reads.
A form that works is about ten questions long and takes under a minute. It gives you one number you can track, and one comment you can act on.
Below is the whole form, written out. Copy it onto a card, into a Google Form, or into your billing system.
Then use the sections after it to score the answers and decide where to collect them.
Key Takeaways
- Ten questions is the working limit. Eight ratings, one recommendation score, two open.
- Ask with the bill, never during the meal.
- Keep name and number optional, and put them at the end.
- Score it two ways: CSAT for satisfaction, NPS for loyalty.
- A form nobody reads is worse than no form, so decide who reviews it and when.
The Restaurant Feedback Form Template
Copy this as it stands. Notes on why each block is here follow in the next section.
Section 1: Your visit
- Date of visit
- Table or order number
- Dine-in, takeaway or delivery
Section 2: Rate each of these out of 5
| What you are rating | Scale |
|---|---|
| Food quality | 1 to 5 |
| Taste and temperature | 1 to 5 |
| Menu variety | 1 to 5 |
| Speed of service | 1 to 5 |
| Staff friendliness | 1 to 5 |
| Cleanliness of the dining area | 1 to 5 |
| Cleanliness of the washroom | 1 to 5 |
| Value for money | 1 to 5 |
Section 3: One question that matters most
- How likely are you to recommend us to a friend? (0 to 10)
Section 4: In your own words
- What did you enjoy most?
- What one thing would you change?
Section 5: Optional
- Name
- Mobile or email
- Birthday or anniversary
- Tick to hear about offers
That is the form. Ten scored questions, two open ones, and a contact block a guest can skip.
Why Each Part of the Form Is There
Every block earns its place by answering a different question.
| Block | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Visit details | Traces a complaint back to a shift, table or rider |
| Eight ratings | Points a low score at one specific problem |
| Washroom line | Catches what guests will not say aloud |
| Recommendation score | One number you can track month to month |
| Two open questions | A specific change rather than a blank |
| Optional contact | Lets you call an unhappy guest back |
The eight ratings are chosen so a low score points somewhere. “Overall experience out of 5” tells you nothing. “Speed of service, 2 out of 5” tells you to look at your kitchen timings, which our guide on customer wait time covers in detail.
Washroom cleanliness gets its own line because guests rarely raise it in person and will happily write it down. Leave it off the form and you may never hear about it until it appears in a public review.
The two open questions are deliberately phrased as “most” and “one thing”. Asking for one change gets a specific answer. The contact block sits last and stays optional, and the reason is in the FAQ below.
Questions to Leave Out of the Form
What you leave out of a restaurant feedback form matters as much as what you keep. These five come up constantly and earn nothing.
- “Rate your overall experience.” It averages away the detail. A guest who loved the food and waited 40 minutes gives you a 3, and you learn nothing about either.
- “Any suggestions?” Too open to answer. Ask for one change instead.
- Anything about your competitors. Guests do not want to be surveyed on where else they eat, and the answers are unreliable.
- Compulsory personal details at the top. They cut your response rate before a single rating is given.
- Questions you will not act on. If nobody is going to change the music, do not ask about the music. Asking and ignoring is worse than not asking.
One more habit worth dropping: numbering the scale differently in different sections. Keep every rating on the same 1 to 5 direction, with 5 always good.
Adapting the Form for Delivery
Delivery breaks the dine-in form. Half the ratings do not apply and the ones that matter most are missing.
Swap Section 2 for these six:
| What you are rating | Scale |
|---|---|
| Food quality | 1 to 5 |
| Temperature on arrival | 1 to 5 |
| Packaging and spill protection | 1 to 5 |
| Order accuracy | 1 to 5 |
| Delivery time against the estimate | 1 to 5 |
| Value for money | 1 to 5 |
Keep the recommendation question and both open questions exactly as they are.
Order accuracy deserves its own line. It is the one thing you can fix immediately and the one guests never forgive twice. A missing side is a refund, a bad review and a lost regular in a single order.
Track it as one of your kitchen success metrics too, rather than only through the feedback form.
Send the request within an hour of delivery, while the meal is still fresh in mind. Next-day requests get answered by people who are annoyed or nobody at all.
How to Get More People to Fill It In
A clever restaurant feedback form with a 2% response rate tells you less than a plain one at 20%.
- Ask at the right moment. With the bill, when the guest is settled and not mid-conversation.
- Have staff ask once, by name. “Would you mind rating us before you go?” outperforms any printed request, and it belongs in your staff training rather than on a poster.
- Keep it to one screen or one card. Scrolling loses people.
- Say how long it takes. “Takes 40 seconds” beats “we value your feedback”.
- Give a small reason. A dessert on the next visit beats a lucky draw, because it also brings them back.
Avoid tying the reward to a good score. Staff will start asking only the happy tables, and your numbers will look excellent while the problems stay put.
How to Score a Feedback Form: CSAT and NPS
Collecting forms is easy. Turning them into a number you can watch is where most restaurants stop.
Two scores do the job, and they measure different things.
CSAT, or customer satisfaction score, comes from your 1 to 5 ratings. Count the responses rating you 4 or 5, divide by total responses, multiply by 100.
CSAT = (responses rating 4 or 5 ÷ total responses) × 100
Run it per question, not just overall. A restaurant with 88% on food and 54% on service has a very specific problem, and an average would have hidden it.
NPS, or net promoter score, comes from the 0 to 10 recommendation question.
| Score given | Group |
|---|---|
| 9 or 10 | Promoters |
| 7 or 8 | Passives |
| 0 to 6 | Detractors |
NPS = % promoters − % detractors
Passives are ignored in the maths. NPS runs from −100 to +100, so it is not a percentage even though it looks like one.
Do not chase a published benchmark. Track your own month on month, on the same form, and watch the direction.
Where to Collect the Form
The form is the same. The channel changes what response rate you get.
| Channel | Works best for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Card on the bill tray | Dine-in | Someone has to type the answers up |
| QR code on the table or bill | Dine-in and takeaway | Needs a short link and no app |
| Message after delivery | Delivery orders | Send within the hour, not next day |
| Prompt inside the POS | Any billing counter | Keep it to two taps at the counter |
Paper still works for dine-in, because a card on the bill tray gets filled in while the guest is seated. It falls apart on volume, since the data sits in a drawer until someone enters it.
A QR code removes that step and reaches delivery customers too. Keep the link short and the form mobile-first, or you lose people at the first scroll.
If you would rather host the form on your own site than a third-party tool, our guide on building a restaurant website covers doing it without a developer.
Whichever you pick, run one channel properly rather than three badly.
What to Do With the Answers
A form nobody reads is theatre. Three habits turn it into something useful.
- Read them on a fixed day. Friday morning, every week, one person. Feedback reviewed occasionally gets reviewed never, so put it on the same list as your opening and closing checks rather than leaving it to memory.
- Call back every detractor who left a number. A guest who scored you 4 out of 10 and got a call is worth more than ten who scored 9 and heard nothing.
- Take one action per month. One theme, one fix, announced to the team. Chasing every comment fixes none of them.
Example (illustrative). Say a 40-seat restaurant in Kharadi collects 63 forms in March 2026. Food quality averages 4.4, service speed 3.1, and six comments mention waiting for the bill. The action for that month is billing speed at the counter, not the menu. April’s forms tell you whether it worked. This is an example, not a benchmark; your numbers will look different.
What to Do When the Feedback Is Bad
Most owners collect customer feedback and then freeze when it turns negative. A simple order of response works better than a policy document.
Respond in This Order
Call within 24 hours. Not a message, a call. Speed matters more than the apology itself, and a next-week call reads as damage control.
Ask one question and stop talking. “What happened?” gets you the real story. Explaining your side first turns a complaint into an argument.
Fix the specific thing, then say what changed. “We have retrained the team” means nothing. “The bill now comes to the table instead of the counter” is something a guest can verify next visit.
Invite them back with something specific. A named dish on the house beats a vague discount, because it gives them a reason to return rather than a coupon to forget.
One caution. Do not argue with a rating. A guest who scored you 2 out of 5 is telling you their experience, not making a claim you can disprove. The score is data even when you disagree with it.
Tell a Pattern From a One-Off
Patterns matter more than individual complaints. One person calling the paneer bland is taste. Nine people doing so in a month is a recipe problem, and the form is what lets you tell those apart.
When the pattern points at the kitchen rather than the service, the fix belongs in your kitchen SOP checklist, not in a conversation with one chef.
Where Feedback Feeds Next
Feedback also feeds the rest of your customer work. The contact details you collect are the start of a loyalty programme, and repeat themes in the comments often show up in your table management before they show up in your reviews.
There is a defensive benefit too. A guest who tells you the biryani was cold, and gets a call back, has less reason to write it up publicly. Your form gives them somewhere to complain first.
Once volumes grow, collecting feedback through the billing system saves the typing step entirely. Petpooja’s customer feedback management captures responses against the bill, so a low score is already tied to a table, a server and a time.
At higher volumes the reading itself becomes the bottleneck. Several hundred comments a month is more than one person can theme by hand, and this is one of the more practical uses of AI in restaurants: grouping free-text comments so you can see which complaint is actually the common one.
If you are also running points or rewards off the same contact list, our comparison of restaurant loyalty software covers what to look for.
Conclusion
A restaurant feedback form does not need to be clever. It needs to be short enough that guests finish it, specific enough that a low score points somewhere, and scored so you can see movement.
Ten questions, asked with the bill, reviewed on a fixed day, with one fix a month. That is the whole system.
Copy the form above and run it for a month before changing anything about it. You will learn more from 60 completed forms on a simple template than from 12 on a clever one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Rarely. Changing the wording resets your trend, because this month’s score is no longer comparable with last month’s. Review the form once a year, and if you must add a question, drop one.
Yes, but show the team’s numbers before individual ones. Feedback used to single people out stops being feedback and becomes a disciplinary tool, and staff quietly start steering the form to happy tables. If it feeds appraisals, our note on KRA vs KPI covers the difference between a target and a measure.
Check the ask before the form. Most low response rates come from nobody requesting it, not from the questions. If staff are asking and it is still thin, the form is too long or the link is too slow to load.
No. Reply to everyone who left contact details and scored you poorly, and to anyone who wrote a detailed comment. Replying to every five-star rating costs time and changes nothing.
Use the delivery version, and lean harder on packaging and accuracy since there is no service to rate. Feedback matters more here, because a cloud kitchen has no dining room where problems are visible.
