Evaluating Customer Satisfaction with Your Farm or Market

Many members who participated in Minnesota Grown’s Customer Satisfaction Research Projects have asked how to do an evaluation during the years between USDA-supported surveys. Knowing where to start in asking for feedback from your customers can be challenging. To start, think about what you’d like to know from your customers.

Sometimes, asking your regulars a few questions might give you enough information. At other times, you will want broader perspectives and input from more customers. When you want broader customer perspectives, one relatively easy and helpful way learn more is to ask customers to complete an online survey.

How do I do an online survey?

This article will give you an overview of how to do an online survey. There are essentially five steps:

• Design the survey
• Distribute the survey to customers
• Gather feedback
• Analyze the results
• Share the results

Designing a Survey

Only ask about things you can actually change. If you can’t use the customers’ feedback to change it (the weather), don’t ask! Rather, you could ask about their comfort at the market. If several people mention the afternoon heat, it may be a good signal to adjust the times of the market or add a tented seating area.

Consider information helpful to others. Every farm or farmers market is different, but feedback from the public can also be useful when working with others like city leaders or nearby businesses. You won’t be able to get feedback about every question they may have as well, but by being thoughtful in the questions you ask, you can obtain data useful to these partners too.

Understand who your survey audience is. Ask them a few demographic questions to set the context later. Ask about their age, gender, how did they hear about the market, etc. This information makes their answers more useful. If you are consistent year-over-year, you will also have an excellent reference to understand changes in customers’ habits.

Make sure the survey is not too long. Are you giving prize via a drawing, like a $25 gift card? If so, how many questions can you reasonably ask someone who simply wants to win the drawing? The maximum is likely about 25 to 30 questions, in most cases.

The Survey

Once the survey is live and can gather answers, have a slip of paper with the survey website at each market vendor’s space or actively hand the papers out to market visitors. It is the easiest and most effective way to get them to your online survey. Other ways to reach your customers are via your website, Facebook page, email and texting lists.

Generally, we don’t suggest pen and paper surveys since it takes to enter the data and often means the survey results are never calculated. Additionally, market managers have told us their older customers are comfortable with completing surveys online.

Analyze and Share the Results

After having the surveys live for a month or a season, close the survey and begin to look at the data. Read through the comments and consider any reports your survey software can provide. Are there any obvious surprises? What do the comments say? Are many people saying the same things?

Once you understand what the data and comments say, consider who else cares about this information and think about how you can share pieces of information with your stakeholders. Make sure your farm employees or market vendors can learn from the survey – it will help the next time you ask them to participate if they are able to understand how these survey results affect the bottom line. Community leaders are often interested, too. For example, did you ask how much people spend at nearby farmers market businesses? Such information can be useful when working with officials regarding parking and how positive farmers markets and farm businesses can be to communities.

You Can Do It!

The first time doing a customer satisfaction survey might feel overwhelming, but it is a learning experience. Start small. Pay attention to what goes well and what can be improved. Each time you do another survey, do it better than last time. You’ll notice it gets easier each time!