Your business will get stronger the more you ask for feedback and act on it.

Its difficult to get honest feedback from people. If they are your friends or regular customers then they will likely not want to offend you, if it is given without asking it's generally a complaint. So how do you get honest, unbiased and timely feedback?

The key thing to do is to make it easy for your customers to give you feedback, the more ways of collecting feedback the better.

• Comment cards in the shop at the till and around.
• Feedback forms on your website.
• Details of how to contact you on receipts.
• Add feedback questions to competition entries forms.
• Use your database to send out surveys.
• Have a mystery shopper programme in place.
• Sit down and talk to guests.
• Identify some customers who will give you genuine feedback and not just winge or tell you everything is OK.
• Do some surveys on the pavement outside.
• Have a Customer Question Time, when you invite a good variety of your customers when you are closed, for a structured discussion on the business.

Use the following steps to analyse your feedback to get a sense of importance of each comment.

1. Write each comment on a post it note, even the silly ones!
2. Group the comments into different areas, such as-  building, staff, range, quality etc.
3. Then put similar ones together, e.g. faster service & smiling staff , or toilets & baby change facilities.
4. Count up the number of time a similar comment is made and prioritise by the frequency.
5. Take action and publicise what you are doing to your customers.

Its critical that you communicate to your team how important feedback from customers is and that they should not take things personally.

The whole team needs to understand what your customers want you to do better so they can be a part of the success.