* Customer Hall of Fame—Laurie Long, the Sr. Director of Customer Success at Unica organizes a Hall of Fame to reward customers for innovative use of their products. Winners are chosen after review of applications by outside analyst community. This offers the customer recognition from the vendor, other customers, and from the analyst community.

* On-site assistance for a day—Companies with a strong service/consulting component should send an engineer, consultant or other appropriate person to a customers' site for a day to simply help them gain the full benefit of your product/service. They can glean huge amounts of insight in doing so.

* Sales and support channels—Send the sales people out to find answers to specific questions. Have the support or call center representatives poll their callers with a 1-2 question survey. Leverage these channels to gain answers to specific questions as part of an overall information gathering effort.

These are only a handful of Customer Insight Channels™ that could be leveraged as a key component to help gather customer data that is then converted to insight, made actionable, and used to drive strategic, customer-centric change throughout the organization.

3. Conclusion

The only way to overcome the maladies discussed previously is by listening to customers, making insight actionable, effecting change, and measuring change. Using Customer Insight Conduits™, companies can gain critical insight and when made actionable can:

* Develop successful products and services

* Differentiate from competitors effectively

* Improve prices and margins

* Attract & retain more profitable customers

* Identify & implement appropriate success metrics and incentives

Copyright (c) 2008 Curtis Bingham

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