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Are Your Eyes and Ears Always Open?

Successful marketing requires a level of trust between companies and customers that can be hard to achieve without sophisticated customer research. But these easy techniques can help any company, large or small, get an intimate understanding of your clients' needs.

This essay is adapted from Values-Driven Business: How to Change the World, Make Money, and Have Fun, by Ben Cohen and Mal Warwick.

O.K., we confess. This stuff about listening to customers doesn't necessarily reflect socially responsible values. Oh, it does, to the extent that the satisfaction and well-being of customers rank high in your values hierarchy. But without an intimate understanding of customers' wants, needs, and values it's difficult, perhaps impossible, to gain the level of trust that's required before your customers will be willing to listen to what you have to say about what's on your mind. You've got to get past the basic stuff before you can get fancy.

But how can you gain that understanding? What does "listening" really mean in practice?

A major corporation is likely to have a marketing department with its own in-house research capabilities -- or a big enough marketing budget to hire a top-flight agency to provide those services. That's even the case at many mid-sized companies. But lacking those resources is no excuse to ignore the invaluable insight you can gain from systematically encouraging and evaluating customer feedback. Here are just a few of the many techniques you might adopt at little or no cost:
  • As the company's owner or manager, make occasional phone calls to your biggest customers -- or, if you don't have key customers, then to a random sample of those who buy your products or services. Quiz them on whether they're satisfied with your work -- and ask how well your employees are treating them.
  • Once each year, pay a visit to your key customers to discuss with them face-to-face how satisfied they are with your company.
  • Set up a toll-free number for customer complaints or suggestions. Nowadays a toll-free number costs very little.
  • In the event of any problem that arises with one of your products or services, be transparent. Take immediate action to recall products and correct problems if safety or health risks occur or if quality is poor.
  • Invite your customers to send their questions, comments, or complaints via your company's Web site. Respond to all communications promptly -- first, with a bounce-back email message to thank the customer for writing, then with a message that specifically addresses the customer's concern.
  • Appoint an ombudsperson to follow up on customer inquiries and complaints and ensure that customers are taken good care of.
  • Produce a short quiz on customer satisfaction and include it in your packages, or (in the case of services), your invoices.
  • Once a year survey your customers to elicit their attitudes and ideas about your service. If you have few customers, include them all in the survey. If you have many customers, select a random sample. Always follow up on signed complaints.
  • Set up a log to record the essentials about each incoming call from customers, including date, time, the identity of the caller, the nature of the comment or question, and the product or service involved. Review the log carefully once a month, and monitor it on an ongoing basis to track trends and look for shifts in customer attitudes.
Activities like this will get you started. But it's only a start, because listening to your customers reflects only one side of the picture. In a strong customer relationship, there is a dialogue of sorts on several levels. Your guarantee (or whatever assurances you make to customers about your products or services) communicates a set of qualities about your work that can help inspire the sort of trust that Jeffrey Hollender speaks about -- so long as your claims match the reality. The character of your communications with customers creates another level of trust. If you are open and honest about such matters as defects or errors, service deficiencies, delivery delays, and cost-overruns or price increases, your customers are likely to be more forgiving when trouble arises. But there is yet another level of communications, one that may play an even larger role in fostering the trust that is the heart of our relationships with the life-long customers we all want to acquire.

Excerpted with permission from Values-Driven Business: How to Change the World, Make Money, and Have Fun, by Ben Cohen and Mal Warwick. Copyright 2006 by Ben Cohen and Mal Warwick. All rights reserved.

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