Our first case study: how a Lisbon pastry shop heard from 35 customers in two months

This pastry shop case study shows the kind of customer story QuickFeedback was built for.

Sonia's Almond Tart is a homemade pastry shop in Lisbon. Sonia has been baking since 2003, and her cakes are sold through restaurants, supermarkets, and returning customers who already know the quality.

The product was never the problem.

The problem was silence.

Because Sonia sells through other points of sale, she almost never meets the person who actually opens the box, cuts the cake, and tastes it. Customers could love the almond tart, sponge cake, quindim, orange cake, cheesecake, or pavlova, but unless they went out of their way to write something publicly, Sonia would never hear it.

And most customers do not go out of their way.

Before using QuickFeedback, her Facebook page had received very few new recommendations. The most recent one was from February 2025, and the one before that was from January 2023. About one recommendation per year.

That silence was not a sign that customers were unhappy. It was the opposite. People were buying, eating, and coming back.

They just were not saying anything.

A small QR code changed that

Sonia started using QuickFeedback by placing a QR Feedback sticker on each box.

That sticker gave every customer a simple way to reach her directly. They could scan the code, tap how they felt, and leave a few words in seconds.

The important part is that every customer saw the same path. Positive customers, neutral customers, and customers with a small issue all reached the same screen and the same public review option. Nobody was sorted, filtered, or pushed in a different direction based on what they tapped.

QuickFeedback is private feedback first, public reviews second.

That order matters.

What happened in two months

In the first two months, 35 customers shared private feedback.

Thirty-four were positive.

One message was not exactly a complaint, but it may have been the most useful feedback of all.

A customer said he loved the cake, then noticed something important on the box. The label said how many days the cake would stay fresh, but the production date stamp was missing. That meant there was no starting date to count from.

He could have ignored it.

He could have posted about it publicly.

Instead, he told Sonia privately.

She fixed it the same day. Some boxes were leaving without the stamp, so she improved her process so that her own production date on every box before it went out.

That is the whole point.

The best feedback is not always a review. Sometimes it is a quiet detail from a customer who liked the product, noticed something, and finally had an easy way to say it.

Without QuickFeedback, Sonia may never have known.

Private feedback did not stop public recommendations

One concern business owners sometimes have is simple: "If customers leave private feedback, will they still leave public reviews?"

In this case, yes.

During the same two months, Sonia's Almond Tart received two new Facebook recommendations. Those were the first new recommendations after about 15 months without one. The private feedback did not replace public recommendations. It created more customer interaction overall.

The customers who had something private to say had a place to say it. The customers who wanted to recommend the business publicly still could.

That is the balance QuickFeedback is designed for.

Why This Pastry Shop Case Study Matters

Sonia did not get more feedback by chasing customers.

She did not need a complicated survey.

She did not need staff training.

She simply made it easy for every customer to be heard.

The result was 35 private feedback responses, one same-day fix, and two new Facebook recommendations after more than a year of silence.

For a small business, that is real movement.

Because when you hear from customers sooner, you can fix faster. And when happy customers have an easy path to share publicly, reviews can start reflecting what is already true.

Sonia said it best:

"In two months I heard from more customers than in the whole year before. For the first time I know what they really think, not just the few who decide to write a review."

Read the full case study here.