So many good points in this post – you should break it out and let us comment in detail on each one. Feedback from customers is good, but you’re right: you must OBSERVE.

Most people don’t like to give negative feedback to your face. So they’ll present a pleasant lie (“I just didn’t have time” or “We’re cutting the budget”) rather than tell you they don’t see the value in your product or they find your offerings to be too complicated.

Sometimes they don’t really know why they stopped coming to your store, or quit using their product. Most consumers don’t ask themselves if the product is valuable or if they are engaged by your organization. So if these are the missing elements, they simply don’t have the language to describe it. How can they give you feedback if they aren’t aware of why they dropped you?

One useful tool for me is to talk to people about why they stopped using a similar product to ours and to make sure we don’t fall into the same trap. It’s much easier to get them to talk about someone else’s mistakes than your own!

Beth

Expansion on #9 (Make The Experience Unique) — particularly powerful in the professional services environment, but surely has merit with tangible products as well . . . Make the PRE-purchase and POST-purchase experience truly unique — something your competitors are unable or unwilling to replicate.

I recently took a crack at describing this on the POST-purchase side at: http://tinyurl.com/avkwlx

Many advantages — not the least of which: Doing so can cost very little, or even nothing to execute.

And, I look forward to hanging with you next year at SXSW!

As you probably know, at SouthBySouthwest, Tony Hsich, CEO of Zappos, gave a fabulous keynote about building a strong company culture–a culture that permeates from the inside out (to its customers). Each year, Zappos updates its culture book, the handbook for employees. On the website it’s for purchase around $18, but you might also try asking for a comp copy (I just did via live chat, referencing #sxsw) if interested.

On the angle about soliciting client feedback, I’m a big proponent of the Net Promoter score, although one of my previous employers took a slightly different tact with quarterly satisfaction calls. The results fed into quarterly benchmarks and essentially the company was “graded” based on the median. Meeting goal meant bonus; not meeting goal meant no bonus.

Also at #SXSW was an interesting presentation by iFroggy (@ifroggy). Patrick O’Keefe, author, had a great talk about leveraging customer feedback. Topline, his suggestions were to be authentic in soliciting feedback–even if you disagree with what’s said, ask probing questions and try to find something to learn from it. Also, be appreciative of the time and interest the person took in offering feedback–again, there’s usually something to take-away of value.

Good post, thank you for the suggestions.