As businesses around the country begin to reopen, many consumers are eager to get back to some semblance of normal. But despite this, it’s becoming clear that consumers have mixed emotions and a varying comfort level about returning to the brick-and-mortar businesses they frequented pre-pandemic.
Understanding your customers, their attitudes, and their shopping habits has always been a key part of any brand’s success, but now more than ever brands need to take into consideration customers’ feelings about safety.
As you develop your reopening strategy, it’s worth considering the insight you can gain by surveying your customers about what will make them feel safer about doing business with your brand. You may see trends emerge, such as a widespread desire for businesses to continue offering curbside pickup or to take safety precautions that go above and beyond what’s mandated by state and local public health organizations. This feedback could mean helping franchisees drive more revenue.
If you decide to survey customers, keep in mind that their feelings will vary by market, so you should send surveys at the local level and adjust reopening strategies based on the surrounding community’s feedback. If you send a national survey, we recommend asking for customers’ ZIP code or city/state, so you can extract data by market.
Below are some sample questions we recommend including in a customer survey:
- When we reopen, how likely are you to visit us?
- What is your biggest concern with visiting us?
- What can we do to make you feel comfortable visiting us?
- Would you like to see a list displayed of new precautions and sanitization guidelines in the business?
- While we were closed, we offered curbside pickup and delivery. Would you be more likely to do business with us if we continued to offer these services?
- Would you feel more comfortable visiting us if we required employees to wear masks?
- (For restaurants) How would you prefer to view menus: disposable printed paper menu, online from personal phone, or regular sanitized menu?
- (For fitness brands) Are you be interested in taking outdoor group classes?
- Would you like to tell us anything else?
Once you’ve gathered customer responses, analyzed them, and determined what changes within the business are reasonable to make, it’ll be important to show customers that you’ll do the best to address their concerns both now and in the future. While franchisees won’t be able to eliminate every person’s anxiety over visiting their businesses or to accommodate every request, at least customers will know they’ve been heard. We recommend sending a post-survey email to customers outlining what changes you’ve made. A version of that email can be shared on your social channels, as well.
Fish is here to support you as you reopen your locations. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if there’s anything we can do.
