How to find out what customers really think

Use the listening posts already in place

Every company has "listening posts" where their customers come in contact with their employees: points of sale; calls for information; complaints, repairs, service and returns.

Make sure you've established a process whereby these already existing bits of data are sent to a customer satisfaction data base to be summarized, tracked and reviewed monthly by upper management.

Then add tools such as prepaid postcard surveys at sale and over the life cycle of your product, phone calls after service and repairs to ensure that everything went well, phone surveys of targeted users, surveys of potential customers or new markets, visits to lost accounts by a third party, regular visits by upper management to important customers to find out what changes and additions they'd like in your product and service offerings in the next five years.

To ensure you keep your critical customers and maintain your technological advantage, assign your design/engineering staff to work directly with critical, cutting-edge, demanding customers on their next-generation products using your product or service. This proactive stance will enable you to keep your product or service on the cutting edge of customer needs.