For any business to survive and indeed develop, it needs to maintain a high rate of customer satisfaction.

This is, of course, assuming that its customers are highly satisfied in the first place and this is, for many, the first challenge. It may be that we like to think that all our customers are satisfied, but how do we know, and what methods have we adopted to measure our success?

Feedback is finding out what our customers think of us – it can be positive (a compliment) or negative (a complaint), but whatever it is, as a business, you need to know.

Many businesses measure financial and economic ratios such as footfall, average spend, wages% or occupancy rates, but few measure customer satisfaction.

Whilst the QA visit will always involve feedback, your business will certainly have hundreds, if not thousands more visitors over the year and the only way you will know what is important to your visitors is what they tell you, either solicited or unsolicited.

It is good practice, therefore, to offer guests an avenue through which to offer comments on their experience, be it online after the visit or on paper during the visit or face-to-face with staff members.

Feedback can be as simple as "are you enjoying your meal?” to a one or two page questionnaire which can also be used for relationship marketing.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys are also a great way to track customer trends and find out ways to keep visitors happy. In today’s highly competitive market, many businesses are realising the importance of being customer focused.

The Local Enterprise Companies can offer training courses on the importance of feedback (Focus on Feedback) and advice on how to implement feedback in your business.

The programme covers the importance of feedback, how to obtain meaningful feedback, why a complaint is a gift to your business and setting up systems for responding to and analysing feedback.