Back to: Plan for Growth

Now that you’ve reflected on your own experience, it’s time to connect with your customers to understand what their experience was, and their intentions for the coming year. If you have multiple customer types, you’ll need to come up with a different feedback mechanism for each of them.

Retail Customers

For individual retail customers who make small, infrequent purchases, it often makes sense to use a lightweight survey to gather feedback. We recommend using tools like Google Forms or Survey Monkey, which allow you to view responses individually and/or in an aggregated view to analyze trends.

Try to make your survey as concise as possible while still gathering all the data you need. People’s attention spans are short. Even with the promise of a discount or freebie at the end, survey-takers may run out of motivation halfway through a long survey and give you less thoughtful or accurate answers. Some topics you may want to cover include:

Survey Topics

Motivations

• Why did you seek out our company or products?

Source

• How did you find us?

Product Experience

• How did you like our product overall? How about the flavor, appearance, size, packaging, and/or price point specifically?

Service Experience

• What was your experience of interacting with our team? How easy or difficult was it to physically obtain our product? How was our communication?

We recommend making your questions multiple-choice rather than free-form, to further reduce the amount of effort it takes for someone to complete your survey.

If you do include a free-form question at the end, you may want to include a checkbox for people to indicate whether you can use their words as a testimonial on your website.

You can also ask your retail customers for feedback immediately after they make a purchase, while their experience is still fresh in their minds. This is more easily done if you use an electronic point-of-sale system that allows you to gather email addresses and associate them with purchases. Remember to always get customers’ written consent (“opt-in”) before you send them a survey or any other digital outreach.

Wholesale Customers

A large wholesale customer with whom you intend to have a multi-year relationship warrants a face-to-face meeting or at least a phone or Zoom call. We recommend writing out your questions in advance, so you gather the same information from each customer. You can always add questions if the conversation takes you in an unexpected direction. You’ll want to cover the full range of the customer’s experience with your business, from initial outreach through to delivery logistics and perhaps even your social media presence. We strongly recommend taking written notes, or recording the conversation and using a tool like Otter.ai to generate a transcription you can refer back to. 

What to do if your customers have less-than-glowing feedback? Remember that though hearing about negative experiences can be difficult, the only way you can get better is by knowing where you are currently falling short. If you feel yourself getting defensive, take some deep breaths and see if you can shift your mindset to one of curiosity. Your goal isn’t to respond to anything in this moment — your goal is to learn everything you can about what went well and what you could do better next year.

The big question of course, particularly for larger customers, is: will you buy again next year? And if so, how much? Your customers may not be in this mindset so soon after receipt of the previous year’s crop, but it’s your job to get them thinking about it sooner rather than later. If you have a particular deadline by which you need to order seed, let them know that you’ll be reaching out again between now and then to get a firm commitment.