Paula, Mill Pond Flower Farm
Where does feedback come from?
In Module 2 we discussed how to get feedback from customers to help inform our market planning. We looked at collecting general feedback and surveying customers to find out what they wanted from your business.
Sometimes feedback is easy to spot, straightforward and honest. Someone will tell you what they think and exactly what it is they like about what you do. However, it’s not always so clear and you need to develop a critical eye for your own work and business to enable improvement and development.
We usually have a ‘feel’ for how we’re doing, but it’s often no more than that vague instinct, so it’s important to be able to gather evidence that can provide more information. You can just continue with the ‘feel’ approach, but if you’re planning your business on this basis it is a risk.
Here’s a list of the some of the ways that you’ll receive feedback about your work and your business:
What you’re told by your customers – if you develop a solid and honest relationship with your customers, they will often tell you what they think, particularly if you ask them personally. This really works best with regular customers who have invested their time, money and loyalty in your business. You can gather this information by logging responses (emails, compliments, comments, thank you cards, notes, letters) or sending out a survey, or listening to them at markets and fairs.
What people buy from you – sales figures give a good indication of what customers like about your products and what they need/want. Your accounts are a key element of planning and evaluation. The more information you can easily collect and retrieve about sales, the easier it will be to analyse and plan.
Initial contact – why people get in touch with you is a good indication of whether your marketing information is clear and says what you do. If you get a lot of enquiries about things you don’t offer you might need to make your information more detailed or specific.
Habits – if people build habits around what you do it’s generally because they like it. You can support habit development in the way you work, if you recognise patterns of behaviour.
Social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest etc, can all be exceptionally useful for gathering quick feedback on what you’re doing and shaping the direction of your business. However, you’ll only get responses to what you share so you need to be very clear about your aims.
Website analytics – I’m assuming everyone will have a website, even if it’s a simple holding page. Most website hosting will give information about the activity and traffic of your website. Knowing how often pages are visited, how long visitors linger and how they find you can be very useful information.
A note about Social Media
How much do people LIKE your social media posts? Does it matter? You can have a huge following on social media, hundreds of comments and reactions to your posts and feel like you’re a real success. BUT this only makes a difference if they are your customers. Growing flowers is generally a relatively local business and you need customers who live near enough to buy them. It’s not much good having 15,000 followers in the US if they can’t actually buy anything from you. However, if you want to run workshops in the US, or launch a book aimed at that market those followers might be very useful.
How to approach feedback
Receiving feedback takes courage, particularly when we don’t know whether it will be positive or negative. When we run our own businesses, they are so much a part of what we are and what we do that feedback on our businesses can feel very personal, and therefore threatening. And when we feel threatened, our response is to
Fight – come out all guns blazing and defend ourselves
OR
Flight – run and hide away, pretend it’s not happening
Neither of these responses is helpful as they both create an uncomfortable position for the person giving feedback and avoid addressing the issues being raised.
What we actually need to do is be assertive and follow the Feedback Process:
Be like Walt Disney – a Case Study
When I first started growing flowers for sale, I approached the florist in our nearest town. The shop was really nicely presented, with good quality gifts and plants. It looked like the sort of place that would welcome good flowers that were locally grown. We had a chat, she seemed OK and keen, I got a local journalist to do an article for the local newspaper for the very first British Flowers Week about how we were going to work together. So far, so smiley. I dropped off the first flowers the following week.
I collected the buckets and asked for feedback – ‘They didn’t sell.’ No smiles, no more orders.
I took the buckets away and didn’t return. I continued to grow flowers, sell them and promote locally grown flowers. I developed my business slowly and gently and supplied florists out of the area.
A couple of years later, a local businessman was in a car park outside of town when a huge Dutch flower lorry drew up (it can’t get into town, it’s too big) and the florist went on board to buy flowers. The businessman asked the florist why she didn’t buy flowers from the flower farm just up the road. ‘That’s a Mickey Mouse operation!’ she replied.
The businessman passed on her feedback to me as he thought I should know what she was saying about our business. I laughed long and hard.
And then I thought about it and added other information I’d gathered:
Why didn’t she order from me? I didn’t supply what she wanted, which was cheap, indestructible flowers. She was used to the Dutch system and comfortable with it. She didn’t want to change.
Why was she so dismissive of my business? My interaction with her was right at the start setting up my business. I knew little about the world of florists at that point.
Why was she so ready to publicly criticise my business? Maybe she felt threatened. I was building my business on her ‘patch’ based on values that were the opposite of her own – local, organically grown flowers as opposed to imported blooms. Did she take that as a criticism of her own approach?
Did she have a point? I was willing to accept that in the beginning I didn’t know floristry and the industry, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know how to grow fabulous flowers and create a viable business. I knew that things were changing and the flowers I was growing were in demand.
Two years later I had a phone call from the florist asking if I had any sweet peas to sell. I arranged for her to come and visit. She didn’t turn up.
Another year later and the florist was desperate for some country garden flowers for a party. She came to visit, (Ray wanted to wear Mickey Mouse ears to welcome her to the farm) I showed her around, she smiled, loved everything, took away 3 buckets of mixed flowers for the order. I invoiced for the flowers and she took 4 months and 3 reminders to pay what she owed.
Last year, the florist shop closed.
I could have just dismissed her criticism, but I learned a lot from the feedback I received and my overall conclusion was that I would have loved to have supplied the florist shop with my flowers, but she wasn’t my ideal customer and I wasn’t her ideal supplier. Mickey Mouse is a multi-million pound industry so being compared to him isn’t actually a negative!
Dealing with complaints
None of us want our customers to be unhappy with the service or products they receive. We work hard to grow flowers and foliage, run workshops, arrange beautiful bouquets and want them to be appreciated. However, from time to time people will be dissatisfied and might complain. Encourage them to give you feedback of all types, it will help you to develop your business and to grow.
Collecting complaints
Your Terms and Conditions should give customers information about how to give you feedback
Your website will have contact details for direct email
Look out for signs of uncertainty or ‘lowered delight levels’ when deliveringWebsite analytics show a higher bounce rate
Ask ‘Was everything OK?’ when taking collecting vessels/buckets or taking repeat orders
If you detect dissatisfaction, don’t be downhearted. This is your chance to put it right and improve what you do.
When I was delivering to a regular florist customer she asked if there was anything special she should be doing to condition the roses I was supplying, as she was having problems with them shattering. I was absolutely horrified, though she was at pains to say it wasn’t a complaint. I immediately stopped listing roses as available and set about testing them, cutting at different points, cutting in different ways, storing and transporting. I moved the roses into the polytunnel, refined their care and gave the next order free of charge to the lovely florist. She clearly was concerned about mentioning any problems, but I was so grateful for the feedback as it helped me to become so much better at growing roses as cut flowers.
You can deal with complaints by using the same feedback flowchart discussed earlier.
Be methodical about it and try to think clearly, even though you might feel stressed.
If you can’t think straight at the time, ask for some time to investigate or clarify
Don’t be frightened to ask for more information, it will all help
Give a timescale for responding to the complaint.
Accepting and appreciating compliments
Compliments should be easy, positive and helpful. However, we often feel uncomfortable with people praising us or what we do. As children brought up in the UK, we were often encouraged to be modest, not show off, or boast about our achievements and this can lead us to be embarrassed when someone draws attention to us or our work.
If we continue this approach for our businesses it means that we aren’t behaving assertively and are actively demoting our success.
In Module 2, I was so tempted to downplay my success in developing a good wholesale market for my flowers that I felt I had to remind myself by writing the following:
"When I was writing this section, I kept on wanting to write that I’m lucky/ fortunate to have a fantastic group of ideal customers. However, I haven’t written that as it’s not about luck. It takes a lot of time, care, ongoing work and commitment to recruit and retain customers who ‘get’ what you do - when you have them, value them and congratulate yourself, don’t think that it’s luck or chance. Take the credit!"
The way that success is written about often highlights luck, fortune and the help of other people. We aren’t good at saying ‘I did this!’ While it’s great to acknowledge team work and assistance, be under no illusion that the person creating this business is YOU.
So, when someone takes the time to tell you you’ve done well, acknowledge their feedback in the same way you would if it was a complaint:
Accept compliments graciously, store them up, record them and treasure positive feedback.
Always test them, critically evaluate and keep perspective, but take as much notice of a compliment as you would a complaint. Getting into the habit of accepting compliments has the effect of building confidence. It helps to change the script in your head to one that encourages you to try new things, stretch yourself and be proud of what you’ve achieved. When you are your business, to promote your business you need to promote yourself, be confident and own your achievements. Start NOW!
“TASK
Write down all the things you have done this season that you are proud of.
What can you learn from this? ”
Maintaining perspective
You get a call from the bride’s mother to say her corsage has drooped and ruined all the photos. The whole wedding day has been spoiled.
What do you think?
Can a whole wedding day be ruined by a droopy corsage? The answer is definitely NO. Obviously it would be better if the corsage hadn’t drooped, but it’s simple to take off and continue. No one has been injured, the bride and groom can still get married and live happily ever after.
It’s easy to get caught up in the drama and stress of other people’s life events. Often it’s the things that don’t actually matter, the details outside of the actual situation that can become the focus of stresses and anxiety. Although flowers are our business and obviously important as our income and livelihood, we need to maintain a healthy sense of perspective.
Flowers are just decoration, an optional extra, life can still go on without
them.