Customer experience
Retail store feedback survey
Start with the only question a shop really has — did they find it? — then ask what stopped them.
Why this survey gets sent
“Footfall is up and the till says otherwise. Somewhere between the door and the counter we are losing people, and I have been guessing at the reason for two months.”
A shop that only measures satisfaction learns how the visit felt. A shop that first asks whether the shopper found what they came for learns why the visit ended without a sale — and that answer usually points at a shelf, a sign or a queue, all of which someone can change this week.
What is in it
- Which branch you visited (dropdown)
- Did you find what you came for? (single response)
- If something was missing, what was it? (long answer)
- Staff, range, display, moving around — one rating grid
- How long you waited to pay (bands of minutes)
- How our prices compare with other shops (single response)
- How likely you are to shop with us again (rating)
- The one thing we should change (long answer)
About 4 min to answer
Retail store feedback survey
About 4 min
How to write this survey
Ask whether they found it before you ask how they felt
Every other question in a retail survey is downstream of this one. A shopper who walked out without the thing they came for will rate the staff politely and never return, and a satisfaction average will hide them completely. Four options are enough: everything, some of it, none of it, and an honest “I was only looking around” so browsers are not counted as failures.
Then, and only then, open a box and ask what was missing. That box is the most valuable field on the page: it is a list of items your shoppers wanted, in their own words, written by people who were standing in the aisle an hour ago. Read it weekly with whoever decides what the shelves carry, and keep it optional so it never blocks the submit.
Name your branches before you publish
The branch list arrives with placeholder entries on purpose — replace them with the names your shoppers actually use, not the ones in your accounting system. People say “the one by the roundabout”, and a list that says “Store 4B” gets guessed at or skipped, which quietly ruins the only column that lets you compare one team with another.
If you can print a different code for each branch, do that instead and delete the question altogether. A branch that answers itself is one less thing between a shopper and the submit button, and the data is better because nobody had to remember anything. Keep the dropdown only for the shops where one code is shared across several doors.
Rate the things a shopper can see
Four rows, each of them something a visitor can actually observe: how the staff helped, how wide the range was, how the goods were displayed, and how easy the place was to move around. Anything a shopper cannot see from the floor — stock systems, supplier terms, the rota — does not belong in the grid, however much you would like an opinion on it.
Label all five columns, from poor to excellent, and keep them identical between branches and between quarters. An unlabelled middle column means a different thing to every reader, and a grid whose wording changed in February cannot be compared with January however carefully the results are charted. In Arabic the grid mirrors, so the excellent end stays where the reader's eye begins in both languages.
Measure the queue in minutes and the price as a comparison
Waiting is the complaint shoppers remember longest and the one they describe least accurately, so give them bands rather than a box. No wait, under five minutes, five to ten, more than ten: four choices that a tired person can pick in a second, and that a supervisor can read against the hour the visit happened.
Never ask a shopper to judge a price on its own — they will call it high, because everybody does. Ask how it compares with the other shops they use, and offer them the option of saying they do not compare. The answer you get back is a position in a market rather than a mood, and it is the one a buyer or a category manager can take to a supplier meeting.
One box to write in, and a code by the till
Ask for one change, not for comments. “What is the one thing we should change in the store?” is answered far more often than an open invitation, and what comes back is a single sentence a branch manager can pin to the staff room wall. An unbounded comments box returns either nothing or an essay, and neither becomes an action.
Put the code where the visit ends: on the receipt, at the till, on a small stand by the exit. Feedback collected in the car park is about the last two minutes; feedback collected the next morning is about how the shopper feels that morning. Keep the contact field optional and last, say what it is for, and let everybody else stay anonymous.