1 - Provide a great service - This should go without saying but really scrutinize the experience you are giving the customer. Does someone from your staff greet every customer when they walk in? Are your sales staff knowledgeable and do they meet the customers needs? Can they offer complimentary products? Do they actively listen? Is the shop clean and professional?  With fresh eyes walk into your shop at least once a week and look for things that could be better and then make a plan to work on them.

2 - Listen to negative feedback - Be a collector of negative feedback. Really try and understand what went wrong and how you can keep it from happening again. Notice if you get the same comments again and again because those can give you insight into staff challenges or neglected customer needs.

3 - Be active on social media - Make a decision about how many social media platforms you can reasonably handle, get accounts on those platforms and then be really active by posting pictures, advertising sales and talking about your products. This is another way for people to get in touch with you and have a direct line if problems arise.

More important even than consistency on social media platforms, is engagement. Respond to comments, address problems if someone leaves something negative on your page and start conversations. People are less likely to leave a negative review if they know you are engaged and will respond.

4 - Be easy to contact - Make available a few different ways that your customers can get in touch with you. Have a website and keep it current. Have an email that you check at least once a day. Have more than one phone line and make sure all your information is on your receipts so people can quickly find a direct line to you. If you are available when people have a problem, they will be more likely to talk to you about it instead of posting online.

Find Out What Customers "REALLY" Think, With Your Shop's Own Online Customer Satisfaction Survey,
and Then Act On It! 

5 - Encourage customers to leave reviews - You don’t want negative reviews but having no reviews is even worse! At least if you know what the problems are, you can work on correcting them but if you only have a handful of reviews that just say something vague like, “the customer service sucked” or “I will never go back here”, you can’t fix those. You would have to do more digging to find out what actually went wrong. Having a large number of reviews is better so ask people to leave them. Do giveaways or add it to the bottom of your receipts to encourage and make it easy for people to leave you reviews.

6 - Respond quickly to issues that arise in-shop - If the customer is in the shop and you can see by the look on their face or the tone in their voice that they are not having a good customer experience, deal with it immediately. Don’t wait for them to leave, tell their friends or leave a negative review.

7 - Apologize sincerely and make it right - The day will come when you will get a bad review. The first thing you will you need to do is apologize. Don’t be defensive or try and blame the circumstances. Just apologize sincerely.

After you have apologized you need to make it right. This can be done in a number of different ways depending on the situation. Please don’t have a form response to every negative review. That just looks tacky and will put people off. Answer like a human and offer something to correct the problem. If the person found that it took 20 minutes before someone offered to help them, mention you’ve increased staff numbers. If the person said they found the same part somewhere else for cheaper, offer them a price reduction. Note their problem and then talk about the solution.

In summary - Put your customer in the center of your business.
Thanks to customer feedback you can make sure that your clients will stay with you, be loyal to your brand and in consequence will spread positive word-of-mouth for you.

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