UK supermarket retailer Waitrose has found kiosks to be a simple tool in capturing live customer feedback, with over 700 customer surveys coming in a week.

As a result its “Little Waitrose” convenience stores will now use interactive touch screens within customer experience kiosks to gather customer feedback.

On route to the payment tills, customers can now quickly complete a four-screen survey to rate their experience in less than 20 seconds. A integrated text analysis tool will decipher comments left by customers and feed the information back to Waitrose’ managers and head office to respond to on a real time basis.

Richard Quarterman, service innovation manager at Waitrose, said: “The introduction of the touchscreens gives us another way of capturing what our customers want. As the survey is quick and easy to use, we have significantly increased the number of customers responding to us. As it provides real-time feedback, we can start to track customer responses across different times of the day and days of the week, giving our operational management teams’ valuable insight into store performance within a clear frame of reference.”

Thinking of installing your own kiosks? Here are five tips for an in store customer feedback kiosk:

1)   Keep the survey simple with up to ten relevant questions so that users can complete the survey in less than a minute.

2)   Put the touch screen in a location that receives high footfall such as by the till point or in an area that people linger such as the customer service, or the seating or café area.

3)   Make sure the kiosk is accessible to all customers – consider height, surrounding space, size of text and screen colouring.

4)   Use additional, but simple messaging to advertise the feedback point like a poster next to the kiosk, a simple on screen message and encourage staff to promotes its use.

5)   Use an incentive to encourage customers to take part in the survey such as entry into a free prize draw.