What Your Shoppers Are Saying About Your Store — And Why You Need to Hear It This Fall

If you tuned into IGA’s recent webinar featuring Director of Communications & Marketing Jessica Vician and Retail Learning Institute Learning & Development Director Jason King, you heard something that every IGA grocer needs to know: starting this year, earning IGA Five Star Recognition requires more than a strong spring assessment. It requires your shoppers’ voices, too.

Watch the webinar below or read the recap of everything covered, including what you need to do next.

Five Star Recognition Is Getting an Upgrade

For years, the IGA Five Star Recognition Program has rewarded retailers who consistently deliver an exceptional shopping experience — strong operations, standout customer service, and effective merchandising. But in 2026, the program is evolving.

Five Star now has two required components:

• The Spring Assessment: a third-party in-store evaluation that documents operations department by department, with photos and detailed notes accessible through your retailer dashboard
• The Fall Voice of the Consumer: a customer-facing survey that captures what your shoppers actually experience in your store

Both are required. You need to complete both to earn Five Star Status this year.

It's not an 'I got you' type of program. It's just areas for opportunity for improvement — little things that retailers can improve to compete against national chains." – Retail Learning Institute's Jason King

Introducing the Voice of the Consumer (VOC) Program

The Voice of the Consumer is a turnkey customer feedback survey platform built specifically for IGA retailers. It’s designed to give you a true, data-driven picture of your shopper experience — the kind of insight that national chains invest heavily to collect, now available to independents.

Here’s how it works:

• IGA creates a custom survey for your store and delivers it along with a QR code and marketing materials
• Your customers access the survey through QR codes on receipts, in-store signage, bag stuffers, your website, or social media posts
• The survey runs for two to three weeks and includes just six questions that cover customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score (NPS), a five-star rating, and an open-ended comment field
• Once the survey closes, IGA scrubs the data and delivers a full results report within one to two weeks

The target is 100 responses per store, which is a statistically significant sample that gives you real, actionable data, not just a handful of opinions.

What You’ll Actually Learn

The survey captures four types of information:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely are your customers to recommend your store to someone else? NPS is one of the most reliable measures of customer loyalty, and it's one of the core metrics VOC delivers.
• Five Star ratings by category: Shoppers rate their experience on a one-to-five scale, giving you a category-level read on where your store is excelling and where it's falling short.
• Customer satisfaction scores: A quantitative read on how well your store is meeting shopper expectations overall. This is a number you can track, benchmark, and improve over time.
• Open-ended comments and contact information: The qualitative gold. Verbatim feedback tells you what scores can't. Plus, if customers opt in with their contact details, you can follow up directly.

We think we know our shoppers, but some retailers from the pilot came back and said, ‘Wow, I had no idea.’ They thought the feedback would be one thing, and it was something entirely different.”— IGA's Jessica Vician

The open-ended comments in particular can surface issues around customer service, product selection, wayfinding, or store conditions that you might never identify on your own. As Vician noted, it’s easy to go “store blind,” which happens when you stop noticing what a first-time shopper sees immediately.

And if a customer leaves glowing feedback? Reach out and thank them. If someone flags a problem? Let them know you heard it and you’re fixing it. That kind of direct, personal engagement builds loyalty that no national chain can replicate.

What the Pilot Taught Us

IGA ran a VOC pilot in fall 2025 with approximately 150 retailers. The program worked, and the team learned from it, refining the questions and process before this year’s full rollout.

One of the clearest lessons: the Voice of the Consumer complements the spring assessment in a way that makes the overall program stronger. The spring assessment is the view of one trained evaluator on one day. VOC is the view of your actual customer base over several weeks, which serves as a true reality check on what’s working and what’s not.

“The spring assessment is great, but it can be a little flawed — a load comes in, everyone calls out sick. This is a true voice of the consumer, a true reality of what your store is doing.” — Jason King

How to Get Started — and Why August Matters

Getting signed up is straightforward. Fill out the registration form with your contact information, number of locations, store names, preferred survey launch date, and the incentive you plan to offer shoppers (a $100 gift card drawing per location is the recommendation).

From there, IGA handles survey creation and delivers your QR codes and marketing materials. For a single-store operator, that can happen within a week of registration.

The August deadline exists to protect your timeline. Surveys need to run and close before the holiday season, giving IGA time to process your results and giving you time to act on what you learn before the 2027 spring assessment window. Register later, and you compress that timeline in ways that work against you.

Ready to Register?

Fill out the VOC registration form today here. And if you missed the webinar, the recording is available to share with your store team.

Questions? Reach out to your IGA representative — our team is ready to help you get set up.