Customer Reviews

We had a really brilliant day in the shop last Saturday, one of those perfect bookshop days that we dreamed about in the beginning. Before the beginning. Customers came and went all day, the till rang out, people bought books, they bought cards, they chatted to each other, they played games, they talked about how lovely the shop looked, they commented on how delicious the cake was. It was, quite frankly, a delight. Living the dream, we said to each other at the end of the day. Aren't we lucky.

Sunday morning, I got an email from Google. I get one every time we get a new Google review, which has only happened a handful of times so far and so far they have all been pretty nice. My heart hit the floor: someone had given us our first one star review. One. Star.

There is a prank that I heard about when I lived in the USA - a group of kids would put a dog poo in a paper bag, light it on fire and leave it on the doorstep of a neighbour they didn't like, knowing that the person would open the door and immediately step on the bag to put the fire out, thus getting poo on their shoe. This is what it felt like to receive that email over breakfast in my house, sitting there with poo on my shoe, knowing that people disliked me and my shop enough to put it there, and not knowing how to answer back because they weren't standing in front of me, just, sending their unhappiness with me through the void. It felt, in a word, horrible. In another word, personal.

I'm no stranger to customer feedback. In my twenties I worked part time as a mystery shopper, rating shops, hairdressers, cafes and other services for their appearance, customer service, cleanliness and welcoming feel. This job taught me a lot about the customer journey, including how to think about everything from the first customer interaction, often with a website, to approaching the shop, signage, welcome and navigating the store to find what I want or get some help if I needed anything. My feedback was always given internally, never publicly, but even then I only ever gave one bad review. The woman who took my review over the phone said that I was always kind and fair so I must really have had a bad time of it to give such a low score. I also worked for a company that used mystery shoppers and was reviewed myself (98% rating, on my last day, but that is another story), so I have experienced both sides of that type of review.

About 15 years ago I worked for Feefo, an online customer review system that you can still see on websites for all sorts of companies. The founder lives in Ludlow and there was a small team of us locally assisting companies to handle public customer feedback in the early days before everyone sent an email asking you to review every toilet roll purchase, back when it all felt a bit new and different. The reviews were set up so that a customer could leave a positive star rating without saying anything, but that if you gave a poor review, one or two stars, you had to add a comment explaining why, so that the company had an opportunity to learn and reply. Our advice then was to always respond to negative feedback, because it showed that you were listening and that you cared, and that negative feedback out in the open is genuinely useful because at least then you know what people are thinking about you and thus you have an opportunity to fix it. But responding to negative feedback is hard, and it makes me wince to see those that try it and end up either repeating the same answer or apology or, worse, getting into a fight with the customer for some reason.

Polly was upset when I told her about the one star, and spent the rest of the day, and probably the next few, asking when exactly the review had been written so she could try to work out who they were and who they had spoken to and what their experience had been and why they hated us. It bothered her. I, in turn, processed it by talking, particularly to other people who work in public-facing roles and have had bad reviews, including the pub where I work. The landlord there is still stewing over a one star review customers had given him because they didn't like the bad language other customers had used on the table next to theirs. Other customers! Not even his team! He is not getting over that one in a hurry. Polly and I discussed what the customer didn't like, analysing every detail and arguing with the customer's thoughts, questioning her judgment, and wondering how rude they had been to us to have not had nice service from us in the first place. How could she hate our little business that we love so much and have worked so hard on? I voted NOT to respond to the review on Google as we would end up getting into a fight with the customer and it would not be a good look. We would just have to take it on the chin and accept that someone had a bad time in our shop. Yes, we said. Get over it. Even so, it lingered in our hearts.

A couple of nights later I was at a reading by Noreen Masud, talking about her book, A Flat Place (read it immediately if you haven't already). Noreen is a thoughtful and beautiful human being, and in the Q&A I asked her how she handled writing about other people, including her family, in her book, which is a memoir. To tell the truth, but also be sensitive to their thoughts and feelings about the situation, it's a fine line and a delicate thing to do well. She replied saying that no matter what we do in the world, there will always be people who don't like what we do and disagree with us, that it is the very nature of being alive in the world, and so we might as well just do our best to get on with it, and not worry about it. It is just part of being a human being. It was the wise advice I needed at just the right time.

She is correct of course, we can't always please everyone, people will disagree with us whatever we are doing in life and Polly and I have, already, had plenty of people be disappointed with us about what we have done with the shop since we took it on. No soup? No toasties? Where is the art section? What, no teacakes? We have got used to having these feelings given to us by people walking into our space (Polly handles them better than I do). Normally, however, these are in person and fleeting, private, but a one star Google review is public, permanent, and given at a distance, meaning that we don't have a chance to fix things in the moment, to connect on a human level and find a way through whatever it is together. It really made me think about how we use online customer reviews in the world, what they are for and how much we trust them. How do we know that these strangers have the same taste as us? How do we know which ones are relevant to us? Gosh, what a minefield.

Anyway, I am (mostly) over it now. I'm really sorry that you had a bad time in our shop, Reviewer, it was not consciously done, and your experience cannot be rectified now. We will keep showing up and doing our best in the shop, two little human people with all our skills, feelings and imperfections. We will keep trying to craft our little business to make it the best that we can, and perhaps one day you will come back, and you will have a better time. Or maybe not. Either way, peace to you, Reviewer, and to us. We will stop thinking about it... presently.

Rachel