To learn what customers really want, ask them!

Communicate with your customers. That includes your best customers, your squeaky wheels, and the great silent majority. In the wired world, word of mouth spreads faster and carries greater clout than any marketing. This is not a mantra. It is a wired reality.

Feedback and customer service are the new marketing opportunity. Engage customers in a dialogue using on-site feedback and real-time conversations to determine what they want. Don't assume you can guess what they want. Each customer contact is an opportunity to extend the relationship and increase lifetime customer value. Responding to customer feedback within 24 hours should be part of your corporate policy.

Communicate with customers to:

1. Discover how they feel about your offering and brand. Know if your brand delivers on its promise in customers' eyes.
2. Determine what they want from your company. This is one way to gather early input on where to direct new initiatives and how to modify marketing.
3. Extend your relationship with your best and most influential customers. Tied to your brand, these customers have strong feelings and insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your offering and want to help you.
4. Test ideas for quantitative research. Tap into your customer base to test planned market research. This can save you headaches down the road.

Ways to reach out to customers:

1. Ask users for input. Place a "feedback" text link in the footer on every Web site page or in the site's navigation bar. Collect customer input at every touch point. Depending on your offering, you may want to solicit customers, visitors, or both.
2. Monitor and respond to non-customer service feedback. Responses should be timely and go beyond automated, preformatted answers when you're confronted with non-routine requests.
3. Randomly select customers and request permission to talk with them. To get input from visitors who aren't customers, use a pop-up window or a box on the home page. Consumer time is precious; send a personalized e-mail or call to arrange a time to talk at the consumer's convenience. Only a small percentage of customers contacted will talk to you. Consider using a special e-mail address for these communications.
4. Talk to customers. Consider creating a list of questions to ask. Ask customers for their stories about using your product.
5. Take good notes and record each conversation. You'll want to verify what was said and, over time, detect consistent themes in the comments. Notes will help create a sense of the true importance of an issue after the conversation fades.
6. Leverage customer service. Gather additional information from and about your customers. Talk regularly with customer service reps about what they see as emerging issues.

Follow up customer contacts by:

Thanking customers for their time. This will build goodwill and extend your relationship. If you plan to use customer stories publicly, request permission.

Maintaining ongoing contact with these customers. Having initiated the connection, consider ways to enhance it.

Analyze consumer input:

Compile customer feedback, good and bad. Break out input by categories relevant to your business and brand. Cull direct quotes to illustrate points. Use this input as the basis for business changes or quantitative research.

Track and include feedback indicators. Track items such as the number of e-mail messages received per day and average response time. The aim is to surface issues quickly. Even a lack of customer response may be an important sign.

Add a commentary section summarizing feedback themes.

Distribute to senior management.nGet management's input as to what they need to help better steer the business.

Monitor cost and benefits of the ongoing, proactive customer communication program. Although this process generally leverages existing resources, so incremental costs are minimal, benefits can be difficult to directly quantify.

By communicating with customers directly, you open a channel that allows you to tap into customers' feelings. If you know there's an issue with your offering, technology, customer base, or competitors, you can deal with it. The sooner you identify a problem, the more quickly you can respond to it.

After all, every problem is an opportunity.