Jenny (00:32)
welcome back. Today we are talking about how to deal with negative feedback, whether it's founded or not. And I have a few horror stories I am including in here, not to scare you guys off, but just to let you know that everyone experiences negative feedback. Even if you are the best, most amazing flower farm in the world, this is just a part of having a business.
And so I know it can sting a lot when you get negative feedback, but we're going to talk about that today, different kinds of negative feedback and how you can deal with it.
When I first started my flower farm, I used to get super, super upset about negative feedback, any kind of negative feedback at all, even if it was slightly negative, which I never got a lot of, but I was just working so hard. I wanted everything to be perfect. Maybe you can relate, but you know, after a while I realized that there was a difference in the feedback I was getting.
Sometimes it was constructive feedback and sometimes it was like completely unfounded and really harsh that really had nothing to do with me. And so these two different kinds of feedback can be handled in different ways. So we're going to talk about that today. And I think this topic really matters because it can be really easy to feel down to like feel like your soul has been crushed when someone has something negative to say.
And even though negative feedback can be tough, the way that we handle it can really affect our success. You can handle it in a way that can really make you and your business a lot better. So let's talk about just sort of understanding negative feedback. There are kind of two types here. There's constructive feedback, which you want and unfounded feedback, which stings a little bit more. So constructive feedback offers.
specific actionable insights. Like if somebody said to you, your bouquets are beautiful, but I would love to see more colorful flowers. Or if they said something like,
These dahlias are amazing, but they don't last very long. Okay, that would be constructive feedback where you're like, yes, I could see how you're telling me something negative, but that's either something I can improve or I can educate you on better, or we can turn that into something, some kind of improvement in some way. Then there's unfounded negative feedback, which is generally
either very vague or emotional or just simply untrue. Like if someone leaves you a review and says, this business is absolutely terrible with like no other reasoning. Like clearly there's just like nothing you can do about that. So.
A story about this is I used to send out a survey to all of my CSA members asking for feedback where the feedback I got was both constructive and unfounded.
One constructive piece of feedback I got a long time ago from one of our CSA subscription members was person in particular loved our flowers, like absolutely adored them. However, the pickup hours for our flower CSA were really difficult for her to pick up at. I think we used to have them like in the middle of the afternoons on like a Thursday or something like that. And so,
She was basically like, I love your flowers, but I can't buy from you anymore because I can't make these pickup times. And I was like, okay, this is actually a great piece of negative feedback because it told me that we needed to make it easier for our customers to get flowers in their homes and we needed better pickup times. And at this point in my business, I didn't have a super large CSA subscription. And so that was telling me like, I could change things here.
So we could get more customers and sell more flowers. So what we ended up doing was polling all of our customer base to ask what days of the week and what time of the week would work best for them for their flower pickups. And based on the information we got from that, we changed our pickup days and times. And we generally don't really get any complaints about that anymore because we have lots of options for different people to pick up. And so that's just an example of.
constructive feedback that's actually like really good for business. Like you want constructive feedback because it's just going to make you and your business better. Now, after a while, I really should start pulling our CSA again, but here's the truth is that I actually stopped sending out surveys to our CSA subscription customers because after a while I kind of stopped getting
constructive feedback, like it was all super positive or completely harsh, completely unfounded, like clearly not our customer, like not meant to be one of our customers. So it was either like amazing feedback or the complete opposite end of the spectrum. There'd always, there would be like one person who'd be like, you suck and like nothing else. So, you know, one, in particular was a subscription customer who
Basically said in her feedback form that our flowers were way too expensive and she could go buy 10 times the amount of flowers from trader Joe's for half the price or whatever. And so clearly she did not appreciate what we did. She didn't appreciate the beauty and the uniqueness of our local flowers. She couldn't see the difference somehow between, you know, this beautiful five inch wide vernunculus and like the crappy spray roses you get at trader Joe's. Like she didn't see the value there.
now this could maybe have been in a different situation, constructive feedback. If I had really poor quality flowers or like medium quality flowers, and I was still charging a lot of money for them, but I know that that was not the case. We also had not gotten any feedback from anyone else like that. And we had reached out and asked our customers like, Hey, did you feel like this price point was worth it? You know, we got, we didn't tell them we got this negative feedback from this other person, but.
We asked to see if this was a real issue, and no one else agreed with this negative Nancy. So that was an example of unfounded feedback from a person who just wasn't our ideal customer. Another example, this one is sort of in between. For Mother's Day,
One year we did, we used to do this a long time ago. would do deliveries for mother's day, but someone had ordered their mom an arrangement and we had all of our flowers in our cooler. So they were super fresh, full of amazing ranunculus and specialty tulips and narcissus. And we went around town and delivered them. And the next day we got this incredibly awful email in our inbox, just razzing us saying how.
Our flowers, when they were delivered, they were frozen. They couldn't believe that we would give them such awful product and they paid a bunch of money for this. Like, how could we possibly have done that to them? They're never going to buy from us again. And so of course I was like, what? I, there's no way that these flowers were frozen. Like I hand delivered them myself. Like I took every single arrangement out of the cooler myself. I.
drove around, I delivered it myself. I remember handing it to the woman who, who complained and, the flowers were not frozen. They just, they were not. And so we followed up and we were like, I'm so sorry to hear about this, but we're really confused. there's no way that these flowers could be frozen, but could you send us a picture so we could better understand what happened? and just sort of had that conversation with them.
And so they actually sent some pictures back and the flowers looked perfect. They're perfect. And so you can imagine, I was really confused about this. So long story short, this woman who got the flowers had touched the flowers and they were cold to the touch, obviously because they just came out of our flower cooler. And so she assumed that they had been frozen somehow. Like I don't, I don't know. This woman clearly didn't know anything about flowers.
Um, like it didn't make any sense to me, but what, you know, whatever. So our flowers ended up lasting a whole week afterwards. Um, and these people never bought up from us again, but you know, the flowers were not frozen and I had to educate these people about why the flowers felt cold. It's because we store them in a commercial flower cooler. This is how you keep flowers fresh. When you go to the grocery store or a florist shop, you'll see cold.
flower coolers where they keep the flowers in. And so I explained all of that very kindly and nicely to them. But this woman was basically just expecting like fresh picked wild flowers. And she had a different expectation. She thought that they would look different or feel different or whatever. And so clearly, this person, not our customer. In my mind, this person was kind of crazy. But there is something that I could learn from that.
Okay. In both the scenarios I just told you about this woman with the frozen flowers, and then also the person who was like, I'm just going to go buy flowers from trader Joe's, you know, in both these examples, they were just clearly not meant to be our customers, not our ideal customer didn't appreciate our product. because I know for a fact that we delivered super beautiful, really, really high quality product to them. However,
It could have been really easy for me to wave these people off and just be like, you know, they don't know what they're talking about, idiot customers, whatever. There is something to learn here. It was maybe that I was not setting the right expectation for what they were going to receive, or maybe I wasn't educating these customers enough about what our flowers were worth. Like maybe my messaging or my brand positioning was off.
Maybe I could have done a better job of educating those customers as to what they were going to be getting. And so even though I do feel like both of these examples were truly negative feedback that was kind of unfounded, they were kind of crazy people, and mostly unhelpful negative feedback. I still took that information and kind of put it away in the back of my mind, like, okay, next time we do these, flower deliveries, we need to make sure.
in the messaging, in the wording, in our product description, we explain to people what they're going to be getting. You know, we need to be better about talking about how we grow sustainably. And even though we're not certified organic, we try to grow with sustainable practices. And that means our flowers are worth more. And we grow these super specialty rare varieties that you can't grow anywhere else. And so there were things that we improved on because of these negative experiences.
Now it can be super difficult to get negative feedback, whether it's founded or not. And so the question kind of becomes, how do we handle it? So how we handle constructive criticism is different than how we handle completely unfounded, crazy criticism. First, when handling constructive criticism, like when someone tells you something where there's some truth to it, we need to emotionally process that feedback.
before reacting and I guess both kinds of feedback. We need to do this. It's really easy to have knee jerk reactions to these kinds of things, especially when you have like a difficult, angry customer, which, you know, even though you're growing flowers, like you're still going to have those people every once in a while. Cause the truth is there's just unhappy people in the world. Like I used to work at an ice cream shop. was this beautiful ice cream shop.
On this beautiful farm with this amazing view with homemade, most delicious ice cream in the world. Like when I was in teenager, I worked here for basically my whole life growing up. And I would get these awful, just miserable human beings that were so mean and rude when they were ordering ice cream for me. And every time I just wanted to be like, you are ordering ice cream in a beautiful place. You are doing one of the most happiest things in the world right now.
Like how could you possibly be so miserable? But it's just the way it is. It's just the way people are. Maybe they were having a bad day, whatever. So anyways, it's really easy to have those kinds of knee jerk reactions, but we have to be careful not to react super quickly. Like we need to kind of take a step back when we get any kind of negative feedback and emotionally process what is going on.
You really want to look at the facts and just look at what was actually delivered to the customer. You know, if you know, for a fact, you delivered good product, or if there was a chance, even a little bit of chance at all that you might not have, you know, you need to think about that as well and think, is this constructive feedback or, know, can I learn something from this or is this person just absolutely crazy? Most of the time there's something you can learn from it, but just don't react emotionally.
Right away, like assess if there's truth in it, take a breath and then try to respond quickly, but not like in a rushed manner. You just need to emotionally process the information that you have just been given. So if it's constructive criticism and there may be some truth to their complaint or feedback, ask them questions about it. Try to learn more. Ask questions like, can you share what didn't work for you?
How can we do better next time? What would have been a better scenario for you? What would have been an ideal scenario for you? How can I fix this, make it better? And then after you get some clarifying questions, you might learn a lot about the situation that happened. It might make more sense for both of you. For you, for them, you'll figure some things out. And then make sure you thank them.
And then consider those improvements. So show appreciation for that feedback, even if it stings a little bit and just consider improvements that you can make. Like I always give people something like a free bunch of flowers or free bouquet or something to show them how much I appreciate them telling me. And we, so we make it right. If it's our fault, if it's something that wasn't really our fault, but you know, maybe we could have done better on, or maybe they just had a
you know, different expectation. We always want our customers to have positive interactions with us. So if we have a negative interaction, like we always try to make it right. And it doesn't happen very often, but when it does doing this can make a huge difference with your business and making trusting customers that come back, even if they have a negative experience. So sometimes when you handle those kinds of situations with grace,
They really will become your number one fans. An example of this is I had a woman who bought flowers from our farmer's market one time. I don't even remember what kind of flowers they were, but they had like two aphids on it and she saw them when she got home and she called me to let me know. And she was actually super nice about it. She was like, I just want to let you know, like there were some gross bugs in my flowers and maybe it's a problem that you needed to like take care of before they get to other people's houses.
And so of course I was like, my God, thank you so much. I explained to her how we check routinely. Like we scout multiple days a week to look for issues, but you know, sometimes they get missed or sometimes they pop up out of nowhere. Maybe it wasn't even a real problem yet. And those like eggs had hatched, in her house or something, who knows, but I drove out with replacement flowers for her.
apologized profusely, made sure there was nothing wrong with those flowers. They were absolutely perfect. Not a single bug on them anywhere. And she was so appreciative that I went that extra mile. She now buys a full season flower CSA subscription from me every year. So if someone complains, you can really handle that situation well and turn them into number one fans of yours. And so, you know.
If someone complains that your flowers didn't last that long or something, give them a bouquet of something that will last a long time, like give them lisianthus or something that's going to last like two weeks and then use that information that they gave you for product improvement. So the point I'm trying to make here is with this constructive criticism or constructive negative feedback, it hurts to get because we work so hard, but you want to get this kind of negative feedback so you can correct the issues and get
better and it really does make you better. You're always improving and you're always getting better. Now on the other side of things, if you're dealing with unfounded or really harsh criticism, just try to separate emotion from fact. Like I'm a super sensitive person. Like I get really upset when someone has negative feedback because I work so hard and I try so hard and I care so much, but
Sometimes it just doesn't make sense and you have to separate out that emotion and really assess the facts. Just because someone's upset with you doesn't mean you did something wrong.
The big thing here is that you don't want to engage in public battles or huge arguments with customers. That's not usually the answer. You usually do want to respond. There are cases, rare cases, I would say, where you might want to just ignore someone. I would say that probably is not a good idea in most cases. But you can use humor and just sort of deflect to other things.
If it makes it better and can diffuse some of that negativity. So I have, you know, surprisingly when I started talking in the beginning of this podcast, I didn't think I had that many examples of like negative feedback, but it turns out I kind of do. I guess it's just been, I've been at this for a really long time. I've been growing flowers for over a decade. I've been, you know, farming for a long time.
And it's just that these negative experiences, like we don't have a lot of them. They really are few and far between, but they stick with you. Like I, for every negative experience or negative interaction I've had with a customer, I've had probably a thousand super positive ones, but they are really hard to let go of. And like, I feel like they're branded into my brain. So one example of this is one day at the farmer's market, a woman was looking at our flowers and there was a lady bug.
that was on them and I had literally watched ladybugs flying around, bees flying around all day at the farmer's market. And there was one on one of our flowers. And so this was in like the middle of summer in an outdoor market. So, you know, there's bugs and bees flying around and whatever else they come over to the flowers, obviously. And this woman made such a scene.
She threw her arm out in front of her other friend. Like she was like protecting her from the bugs. And she was like, Susie don't buy these flowers. There's bugs on them. You don't want those in your house. And she like yelled it and made this big scene. And then like, they started to hurry away. And I was like, no, no, there's not bugs on them. We're just outside and you know, it's a hot summer day. There's there's bugs out here. And like, they had like run away at this point, but
This other customer who was like standing close by just like looked at me and just like shook her head, you know, like crazy people. And it's like, yeah. Okay. So that person is just obviously like, kind of nuts. Like maybe there's some truth to that. Like, no, nobody really wants like bugs in their house. They don't want to bring flowers on that bugs in their house. But like this person was just like, not our customer. it's also funny because I have had customers.
post photos of our rununculus on their Instagram that have rununculus or I'm sorry, the, the rununculus flowers had ladybugs on them, which we try really hard to not do, but we use those ladybugs as beneficial insects in our hoop houses sometimes. So once in a while, like a ladybug will be hiding under a pedal and it'll make it into the cooler and make it into somebody's home. But we've had customers post that on Instagram and be like, look at how amazing this is.
We buy trademarks, flower farm flowers because we know they're sustainable and they're safe and they're chemical free and they support a healthy environment and ba ba ba. And so it's like clearly dealing with two very different people. The first lady, definitely not our customer. The second person was. now this is probably the worst customer experience I've ever had I was like an angry person, completely unfounded.
And it was really just like, kind of have to shrug it off. So the very last story I'm going to tell you guys about is one particular woman who was gifted a flower subscription. I don't, for her birthday or something. And she like knew nothing about our business, knew nothing about our flowers. It was just her daughter gifted her a subscription and she
didn't pick up at the first pickup, like no call, no show. We called and left a message saying, hey, we noticed you didn't pick up your flowers. We'll hold them till tomorrow if you want to come get them. Sent her an email, like still didn't come pick up. And then she ended up, like we had so many issues with this customer actually. The next week she came and she grabbed two bouquets instead of one. So she took somebody else's, caused a bunch of issues. Then, you know, at the end of the subscription, it was over.
We, we had issues with this customer and she showed up to the farm on a week where we did not have a subscription pickup and she showed up angry, super angry. She just like walked right up to me in the barn and said, I'm here for my flowers. And I was like, I'm sorry, but you know, the subscription ended last week. Remember you got an email saying that it was end of subscription. And she said, well, I missed a week. So I want my flowers from that week.
And I was like, well, that's not how it works. I'm sorry. And I had to explain to her, know, when you signed up, you you got all the information, you agreed to our terms and conditions, which say you have to pick up the same week. There's no, you know, giving you a bouquet if you miss a pickup. And we explained why and blah, blah. And this woman was just so mean and so angry and rude and
Truth be told, if this was a woman who truly was just like a kind of a dummy and like didn't really understand, I probably would have just given her a bouquet of flowers to make her happy and to make me happy. Like I want my customers be happy, but because she was such a jerk, I stood my ground and kindly explained to her how it works and that I could not give her another bouquet. And I went into the whole rabbit hole of like, you know, the flowers are perishable and weed.
pay someone to harvest them for you and arrange them for you. And so, you know, if I were to give you a bouquet now, just because you didn't pick up, would mean that I'm losing money and I understand you don't think that's fair and yada, yada, yada. So this person, obviously she never bought from us again. She was just like an unhappy person. And this is negative feedback that you just have to realize that it has nothing to do with you. You did nothing wrong. This person is not your customer and just.
Let it go. So ever since then, I have been really careful about making sure my CSA and subscription customers understand what they're signing up for. They understand that they have to pick up their flowers every week. There's no substitutions. Like I make sure they understand that crystal clear. So even though that woman, like she clearly just, it was negative feedback that was unfounded.
I still learned something from it and I improved from it. So even though it was hard, I still learned from it and I improved from it. So to wrap up here, here's the important bit. You can take both kinds of those criticisms, constructive feedback and totally unfounded crazy people, and you can still learn a little bit from both scenarios.
You can turn criticism into a business improvement tool and you can actually build trust with customers if you handle that feedback well. Like the woman who now buys my CSA all the time, even though there was aphids on her flowers once. It's knowing when to let feedback go and when to take that feedback and do something with it and move forward with it. So all of this to say,
Negative feedback is hard. It really is. It sucks when you are just working so insanely hard on something and you're doing your best and you get a negative comment. It sucks. But you can really use it to get better, move on. And I will say that any time I've had a negative experience with a customer, as years go on, we get less and less and less of this.
basically get no negative feedback now. I mean, like I said before, for every one negative feedback, we've gotten thousands of amazing feedback. But over time, we've learned what we need to educate our customers on and what we can do better at and improve on so we get less and less of those complaints and truly just make our business better. So feedback is just a part of growing your business. Don't be afraid of it.
Don't take it personally. Don't take it to heart. Try to separate yourself from the facts and just deal with it that way. So I hope that you hearing some of my customer horror stories. think that was just about all of them that I told you about. I hope this was helpful for you to realize that even established farms that like, know I have amazing product and really good quality stuff. Like even though we are established and we have amazing products, like you still are going to get.
negative feedback from time to time, every single business, no matter what kind of business deals with it. So I hope it was helpful. I would love to actually hear some of your horror stories and maybe your worst or your best feedback experiences. Like feel free to DM me on social media, on Instagram. My Instagram handle is at trademark farmer. I would love to hear some of your stories.
I think it would just make me feel better to know that we're all in this together because I know that we are, but thanks for being here for another episode of the six figure flower farming podcast. if you haven't left a review for the podcast yet, it would truly make my day in a bunch of other flower farmers days. If you could leave a quick review, it takes less than 30 seconds. You can leave it on Apple or on Spotify, wherever you're listening to this podcast.
But those reviews really help other flower farmers find this information so we can all grow profitable and thriving flower farm businesses. So if you've already left a review, thank you. If you haven't, please go ahead and do that now. All right, thanks for being here and we'll see you guys next time in the next episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast.
