A restaurant feedback form guests actually fill in

At 11pm, the comment cards come back from the tables. Four out of sixty covers filled one in. Two say "lovely", one is a drawing of a cat, and one complains about the music in handwriting nobody can read.

That's the honest return on most printed feedback. It's not that guests don't have opinions. It's that the format asks too much at the wrong moment, and the answers are impossible to use on Monday morning.

Why most restaurant feedback forms get ignored

The typical restaurant feedback form is a template downloaded as a Word file or a PDF. It has fifteen questions, a five-point scale for every course, and a box for comments that nobody fills in.

Guests see that at the end of a meal, with the bill on the table and a taxi on its way, and they skip it. The ones who do fill it in are usually the very happy and the very cross. You learn very little about the regular Tuesday diner who quietly stopped coming back.

Online survey tools help with collection, but many ask respondents to sign in or land them on a page covered in someone else's branding. Every extra step loses people.

Three questions beat fifteen

A restaurant feedback form guests actually fill in is short enough to finish before the card machine comes back. Three questions is a good number:

1. Out of 5, how was your visit tonight?
2. What should we keep doing?
3. What would make you come back sooner?

Short forms get answered because they respect the guest's time. The first question gives you a number you can track week to week. The other two give you words you can act on. Add a fourth only if there's something specific you need to learn, such as a new dish you're trialling.

Putting the form on the table, not in an email

Timing matters more than wording. A form sent by email two days later competes with everything else in the guest's inbox. A form on the table, while the meal is still fresh, gets the honest answer.

With TinyX you write the form in plain markdown, the simple text format that turns lines into questions, and share it as a short link. Download that link's QR code and print it on the bill folder, a table tent or the back of the receipt. Guests scan it and answer in the browser without signing up for anything.

If you already use QR menus, the same approach applies. We explain how in QR code menus your guests won't hate.

Reading the answers on Monday morning

Responses collect in your TinyX dashboard and export to CSV, so you can open them in a spreadsheet and sort by score. Ten minutes on a Monday morning is enough to spot a pattern: three people mentioning slow mains on a Saturday is worth a conversation with the kitchen.

You can also cap the number of responses a form accepts. That's useful when you run a form for one event, such as a tasting menu night, and want it to close once you have enough answers.

The Free plan includes five questionnaires. Pro and Max raise that limit, and the details are on the pricing page.

Making the questions sound like your restaurant

Copy the three questions above into a new TinyX questionnaire and adjust the wording until it sounds like your staff. A neighbourhood bistro and a hotel dining room should sound different, even when they ask the same things. The features page shows how a questionnaire is put together.

Resist the urge to add more. If the kitchen wants to know about a new dish, swap one question out for a fortnight rather than adding a fourth for good.

Try it on one table first

Write your three questions tonight, print the QR code on a handful of bill folders and leave it for a week. If more than four out of sixty guests answer, you have already beaten the comment card, and five questionnaires on the Free plan leave room to try a second version. For other ways restaurants use TinyX, see TinyX for restaurants.