Companies who have grown in this economic downturn did so because their customers become an army of advocates who grew their business for them.  They made decisions in business that were congruent with the decisions they would make in their personal life – in other words, golden rule decisions.  They “earned the right” to their customers’ rave and the growth that ensued because they deliberately made decisions that moved their operation in the direction of their customers and employees.

Here are ten resolutions companies should follow in the New Year to move toward earning financial business prosperity and “beloved“ status in the eyes of their customers:

1. Believe in the integrity of your customers.

The majority of business policies and rules are created to protect business from the minority of customers. Be bold, like Connecticut Griffin Hospital who began sharing hospital records with patients and saw claims against the hospital drop by more than 43%!  Take a leap of faith and believe that trust is reciprocated by customers when they feel that you trust them. Find one rule or policy to relax and watch what happens.

2. Invest in employee trust.

Show your employees that you believe in them. Beloved companies Wegmans and The Container Store invest in their employees by training them in the skills that remove rules, regulations, policies and procedures that pen employees in. This enables Wegmans to throw away the rule book and live by this: “no customer goes away unhappy.” As a result their margins are higher and profitability more steady because they turnover only 7% of employees versus the average in their industry of 19% employee turnover.

3. Practice democratic decision making.

Make sure the best ideas of your company have a way to see the light of day. Give good ideas a chance to prosper no matter what rank they come from inside your organization chart. Innovation and marketplace differentiation comes when employees are respected as part of achieving a mission greater than their set of tasks, and that their voice counts. W.L. Gore has become a $2.7 billion dollar company; named by Fast Company as “pound for pound, the most innovative company in America;” and earned a place on Fortune Magazine’s best companies to work for list since its inception because of how they unleash the spirit and ideas of its people.

4. Grow and invest in customers as a primary asset of your business.

Talk about customers lost and gained in real numbers, not percentages, to bring home the vast number of lives your business impacts. Understand what drives customers out your door, and begin the relationship by investing in your customers by realizing their long term potential. Zane’s cycles in Connecticut has experienced 23% Growth every year for 29 years, with 45% percent margins because they never lose sight of the fact that their average lifetime value is $12,500. And they manage relationships bearing that in mind. Valuing customers makes it easy to make decisions about how to treat them.

5. Know your power source for bonding with customers.

Regularly connect with customers as they experience your products and services. Surveys and reports are great – but the beloved customers are also avid “customer watchers.” Take a page from Trader Joe’s who use employee taste buds at their testing kitchens to determine what items should first make it to their shelves, but employ customer “tasting stations” inside their stores combined with sales to determine what items stay.  This closeness contributes to Trader Joe’s ability to generate $1300 in sales per square foot – twice the supermarket industry average.

6. Have clarity about how you uniquely serve customers’ lives.

Unite your operation to ensure that decisions connect to deliver an experience customers want to repeat and tell others about. This ties cross-silo decision making together and releases the organization from excess bureaucracy.  IKEA for example, designs the price tag first because they know that they serve customers who have less money in their pocket than sweat equity to put together their items themselves at home. Across IKEA, the understanding that the price drives design, innovation, and what they will and will not do drives their growth…sales that increased even in 2009 by 7.7 percent.

7. Deliberately walk in your customers’ shoes.

You need to know your customers’ life to serve their life. Yet as people rise through the ranks or even join organizations, orientation is often more about process and policy than learning about the customer at the heart of the business. Be deliberate in establishing a process for new hires, such as USAA, who require new ‘recruits’ to wear the flak jacket, and helmet many of their enlisted customers wear and to read their letters. All this is done so that at USAA when calls come in, they begin with connecting with the customer first then the process of the business second. 98% of their customers stay with them year after year.

8. Hire partners – make employee selection one of your most important decisions. 

Select your employees as you would customers – for lifelong value. At Chick-fil-A, operators and employees are selected based on their values, ability to build grow and sustain partnerships in all areas of their lives, and then their technical skills.  As a result, Chick-fil-A has operator turnover of just five percent, and they just achieved 43 years of consecutive sales growth.   Hire people who you want to become a part of the story of your business and then watch how your social media story improves.

9. Proactively solve mistakes when they occur.

When mistakes happen (and they will) get out in front of customers and admit the flaw – then make peace with your customers. Repair the emotional connection, reduce the concern, and solve problem. Southwest Airlines reviews every flight every day to know when they interrupted their customers’ lives, whether it was their fault or not. And they contact customers to explain what happened and when warranted send out LUV bucks for a future flight. Being proactive earned them a net revenue increase from those bucks of $1.9 million in 2010.  What can you be proactive on?

10. Accept the order and the accountability.

In a world where customers are holding a megaphone in their hand where they broadcast on the internet the experience you are delivering, invest in reliability. Don’t make the customer wonder where the order is, how long ‘til it gets there or what happens when it backorders. If a customer can’t tell another customer what they get from you, how they get it or how it feels when they receive it, they you don’t have a story to tell (at least one you want heard). Invest in reliability…earn the right to grow.

“Beloved companies never lose sight of the people affected by everything they do. Their reward is an army of beloved customers who urge friends and colleagues to try these companies and embrace them as well,” notes Bliss.

Companies still jump to surveys and focus groups to find out what their customers need. All they really need to do is to listen and reach out and respond with service when customers need them.

Do you? 

Do customers feel like you are filled with people they can talk to?  How do you respond when they talk about you on social media, or give your frontline feedback about your business?  Learn how Zappos stays connected with customers in a natural and real manner.

No baloney conversations. Real talk from real people.

Twittering is democratic. No baloney. Good “tweets” are short and sweet. There’s no room for any pretense or pomp. Tony (Zappos. com CEO) is a guy who Twitters and he’s glad to have you know him as Tony. So do George and Mary and Sue and all the other  Zappos.com folks (“Zapponians”) sending “tweets” about what’s going on in their day. For Zappos.com, Twittering is, plain and simple, about staying in touch with the people in their lives. This naturally includes customers.

Zappos.com Wants to Be a Part of Customers’ Lives.

Twittering is a natural extension of how Zappos.com exists and participates in people’s lives. Zappos people are straight-talkers who embrace ten principles to guide how they conduct themselves in business.

1. Deliver WOW through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change 
3. Create Fun and a Little Weirdness 
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, Open-Minded 
5. Pursue Growth and Learning 
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships through Communication 
7. Build a Positive Team, Family Spirit
8. Do More with Less 
9. Be Passionate and Determined 
10. Be Humble

Twittering is a natural part of the “conversation” Zappos.com has with customers, suppliers, and now, many people around the world. Zappos also responds to “tweets” about them when possible. The folks there feel it’s only fitting that they stay in touch and reach out—just as you would if you found a friend who needed to talk to you. Go to http:// twitter.com/zappos to join the party and the conversation.

Millions Follow the Zapponians on Twitter.

Zappos’s growth is fueled by their great products and service. But with Twitter, it goes beyond business to make connections personal. One recent tweet from Tony was “Getting a haircut.” Why would anyone want to follow that? Because the commonality of how we go through our days pulls us all together. Following Tony on Twitter creates an unexpected bond. People feel like they know him, so of course they want to buy things from his site. Twitter is deepening  Zappos.com’s connection beyond their initial fan base of zealot female shoe buyers, helping them to expand (as Amazon.com did) into many other product categories beyond the shoes they originally sold. The company that earned the right with shoes continues to earn the right to expand, in part, by letting people know they’re at the dry cleaner.

Too many companies still jump to surveys and focus groups to find out what their customers need. All they really need to do is reach out. Do you?

• Do customers feel like you are people they can talk to?
• Are you part of their lives in a natural way?
• Do customers rave about how you reach out to them today and handle their service issues?
• Do your decisions for being part of customers’ lives in a natural way earn you “beloved” status today?

CustomInk Fuels Revenue Growth By Putting Uncensored Customer Reviews On Their Home Page

In this era of social media, companies who embrace customer feedback and “believe” the words of their customers earn the right to growth. They realize that customers turn to each other more than to advertising and campaigns. Here’s how one “beloved company,” CustomInk fearlessly listens to customers and how it fuels their growth.

Earn New Customers Through Past Performance.

CustomInk prints T-shirts for well over 100,000 groups and families per year. Each order is assigned a designer who personally reviews and inspects each shirt, because, let’s face it, there’s nothing worse than having your typing error printed on 1,000 T-shirts. For example, if you accidentally mistype the word “annual” as “anual” in your T-shirt design, someone at CustomInk who has reviewed your design will catch that typo for you, sparing the obvious pain and suffering you would have otherwise felt when you opened the box of 1,000 T-shirts for your “Anual Fun Run.” But CustomInk doesn’t want potential customers to take their word for the fact that they deliver this level of service—they want their customers to speak for them. So whatever a customer types in as his or her post-purchase online feedback appears word-for-word on the front page of CustomInk’s Web site. And, in this case, to show the authenticity of the comments, customers’ typos stay.

Customers Should Be Completely Informed.

Founder Marc Katz said, “We thought about cleaning customers’ reviews and making them more like testimonials, but we decided that doesn’t mean anything to the customer. Any company can pick a few great reviews. It’s the fact that we leave these uncensored and show all of them. It’s the 1 in a 100 few unhappy comments that show these are real.” So CustomInk puts its money where their customers’ mouths are. Customers tell other customers if they believe CustomInk is the place to trust for T-shirts for their charity event, or the T-shirts that their grandpa and entire family will wear at his 100th birthday party.

Revenue grew 77 percent from 2006 to 2009, fueled by customer feedback.

CustomInk believes and trusts customers to speak for the company. This brave decision to “bare” customer feedback has fueled significant double-digit growth every year since their inception. Revenue of $13.5 million in 2004 is now nearly $62 million in 2009. And this growth is largely organic, driven by customer love, and with no backing of venture capital. For its 284 employees, living up to customer accolades energizes them; people want to be part of a company that believes its customers. Consider giving your customers a forum to connect and convince each other to become your customers. It does take some daring, and trust in your customers’ words. But it is a powerful way to engage your company in customer feedback and to drive accountability in resolving the issues that customers bring up.

Do You Dare to Bare What Your Customers Share?

CustomInk decided to put uncensored customer reviews on its Web site because they believe in the truth of their customers’ words. They trust customers to guide potential customers.

- Do you trust current customers to guide future customers with their feedback?

- Do you censor customer reviews? Do you believe in the truth of your customers’ words?

- How would you rate your intent and ability to believe feedback?

- How would your customers say you are doing? Do customers rave about how you trust them today?

- How does your decision to believe and share customer feedback compare with this beloved company?

- Do your decisions for believing in the truth of your customers’ words earn you “beloved” status today?

- Consider one way to give your customers a forum to connect and convince each other to become your customers.

Every business has customers who have departed.

There are a variety of reasons that prompt departure. And how you react to the departure will either validate that they left for a good reason, or begin the process of bringing back that customer and that customer revenue.

In fact, companies that do a great job of winning back departed customers will frequently have a stronger relationship as a result.

Follow these five steps to identify and regain customer trust and relationships:

1. Track customers who have departed.

Most companies only track customer retention as a percentage of their business. They often don’t get down to the number and the actual customers who have departed. This effort must be about caring about the customers who left not just the percentage or how they impact your balance sheet. So the first is to quantify the volume of customer and the volume of business that departed. This can be done monthly or quarterly, depending on the volume of your business model.

2. Segment and identify those who have departed.

All customers who have departed, especially if you have a high volume business, are not contributing the same value to your business. So now you need to make some hard decisions.  Segment the customer base of departed customers and make a determination which you will reach out to for recovery.

3. Reach out to customers with respect, reason and reconciliation.

Now that you know who you want to save, reach out to them with a phone call. My suggestion is to have two groups within your company make the calls. First, executives should call a handful (1-10) of departed customers in every “rescue” cycle to keep them close to the issues driving customers out the door. The second group is a specially prepared group of people who are trained in a recovery conversation with the customer. This is not a sales pitch. The first part of the conversation is apologizing that the customer left. The second part is listening, intently to the customers’ explanation. The third part is diagnosing and verifying back to the customer why they departed, and cataloging this information for the company. And the fourth part is extending support and immediate assistance in resolving the issue. Finally, there should be an offer (not a pitch) extended to the customer to bring them back. These skills need to be developed and this can be a very rewarding project for your best call center folks, or for exceptional managers within your company. I would not outsource this.

4. Categorize reasons for departure.

Take action.After the calls, there is major opportunity for your company to identify the issues that came from all of the calls and trend and track these issues. By attaching them to the revenue of the departed customers, these issues can also be prioritized. Within the second session of customer recovery, the most critical issues will emerge and there will be no question what you should focus on. There may also be opportunities that arise from these calls about the frontline service that can provide immediate and specific feedback to the frontline that served the customer and potentially contributed to the customers’ departure. Creating a closed loop process for this feedback is very potent, in that very specific information usually comes out of these calls that are productive for coaching.

5. Put returned customers into “Intensive Care”

Once a customer has agreed to come back into your business, to be rescued, keep an eye on them. Conduct a review every six months of their experiences, tracking customer service calls, purchasing, support and other indicators which will identify the health of the restarted relationship. Then reach out again. Your close attention will not go unnoticed.

Results you can expect from customer recovery:

The process of customer recovery has been fruitful in every vertical business where I have seen this practiced. In financial services, with high levels of customer departure, we experienced as high as 30% customer recovery. We also achieved an improvement in frontline service as the feedback gleaned from these calls was provided immediately to the managers of account reps serving customers who departed.  In an automotive client, we experienced 10-15% return for service work following calls and rescue efforts to customers who had lapsed. The key is to ensure that there is a planned process to contact, resolve and reconcile the issues with the customers who have departed. But then there must also be an intention and commitment to fix the issues which pushed the customers out the door. The focus must be to fix the customers AND to fix the company. In this way, the customer rescue process brings back in revenue and prevents future revenue from departing from your business.

Are you agile and flexible in delivering for your customers (and employees)?

A LUSH store can break even in as little as three months. Why? Because their customers grow their business for them. Recommendations fuel their growth.  During the economic downturn, like the other “beloved” companies, LUSH grew!

LUSH knows that they grow by staying fresh…in products, an in experience.  And that pull brings customers back.  In fact, there’s a rule of thumb at LUSH cosmetics, and that’s to fearlessly retire one-third of the product line every year. Change is the magic behind the suds at LUSH. Rather than waiting for customers to tire of products, LUSH imposes a rigorous process to get rid of the old to make way for the new.

It is what keeps LUSH fresh, and it is what keeps pulling customers back. LUSH grows because customers fuel its growth. Remember when you were a kid and couldn’t walk by a candy store without going in, because of the lure and the scent of the candy? That’s how LUSH lures people into their stores. It’s hard to walk by without going in to see what’s new, and it’s hard to walk out of a LUSH store without a bag full of its fresh cosmetics.

Offer the Freshest Products

“If anything, as businesses mature, they get more dull,” says founder Mark Constantine. A major product development guru in his previous life at The Body Shop, Constantine had developed products that, by the 1980s, made up about 80 percent of that chain’s sales. As The Body Shop matured, Constantine felt the fizz leave the business, and so he departed with his concept of the “bath bomb” and eventually founded LUSH. Irreverently calling their bath bomb “A Giant Alka-Seltzer for Your Tub,” LUSH has stayed true to its core of creating natural products with surprising ingredients and off-the-wall names.

To stay constantly fresh, LUSH brings together an annual meeting of senior managers for what it calls the “mafia meeting” because they decide what products to kill during this meeting. Their goal is to offer “the freshest products in the history of cosmetics.” The company is making it happen by NOT sitting still. “Innovate like mad, then start over again” is the mantra LUSH lives.

Word of Mouth Grows the Beloved Companies

Every day, LUSH sells nearly 60,000 bath bombs, the concoction that created the LUSH fan base. LUSH spends little on advertising (customers spread the word) and packaging (they use less material to stay green). Because of this combination of customers’ word of mouth growing the business and LUSH’s enviable low margins resulting from minimal advertising and packaging, a new LUSH store can break even in as little as three months.

In fiscal year 2010, 713 LUSH stores in 43 countries had combined revenue of $409 million. Revenue increased 21 percent since 2008!

What do you do to stay fresh for your customers? As customers’ needs change, do you commit to understanding what they need? What should you consider retiring? A service, a practice, a product?

Are you fearless in dismissing the old and bringing in the new? How do you keep customers enticed and interested?

Over 93% of Netflix customers recommend them.  Here’s why…

In 1999, Netflix introduced what was then a landmark product when they began offering DVD rentals by mail. Prior to that, everyone trudged to the video store for rentals. Netflix gave consumers an option to go online, make selections, read reviews, and get the DVDs for viewing via their mailboxes. Service and “delighting” customers has been the backbone of the company’s offering, and service has fueled their growth. As the market has changed, and Netflix’s easy delivery method has faced heavy competition from digital delivery services such as iTunes and the Comcast cable box, they continued to differentiate with service.

Netflix is so popular that last week they outranked Apple in the 2011 edition of a highly regarded survey of the brand loyalty of American consumers, coming in at No. 1 among the 530 brands tracked in the latest edition of the Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index.

Overcoming Growing Pains

Netflix didn’t rise to this level of esteem without some growing pains, but relying on their core values, and standing tall despite occasional setbacks, Netflix has clearly made great strides in gaining their customers’ trust and loyalty.

For example, in August 2008, Netflix experienced a severe technology glitch that interrupted and halted shipping of DVDs to subscribers. Netflix confessed immediately on their Web site, saying, “IMPORTANT: Your DVD Shipments Have Likely Been Delayed.” They didn’t sweep the problem under the rug and didn’t try to hide from the blame. Netflix followed up with emails to make sure all customers heard the news. Not all customers even knew that there was a delay. Didn’t matter. Netflix was honest in telling everyone and swift in extending an olive branch, automatically applying a credit to subscribers’ next billing statements. New Netflix subscribers who had their first shipments delayed received this message, “We recognize that this is not a good way to begin your Netflix membership and we’ll automatically extend your free trial.” When this glitch occurred, Netflix knew they needed to recover quickly, honestly, and in their own unique way to prove that they were worthy of having customers stick around.

Decide to Say Sorry

Netflix “End of Week” blog update after the shipping debacle posted the message. “Apologies to all once again and thanks for hanging in there with us.” A customer responded with: “Forget all those whiney haters. You guys did your best. You deserve praise for getting through it, not hatred for having some hiccups.” It’s estimated that Netflix's recovery cost it $6 million. Because they communicated directly with customers, their decision and actions were applauded and fueled their growth. And that growth has skyrocketed, placing Netflix, as of February 14, 2011, in the top five companies in the Internet Retail industry as measured by relative performance, ranking first with a gain of 3.78%.

Do You Confess to Customers When Something Happens?

Netflix, the DVD-by-mail subscription service, let all customers know that they were experiencing a technology glitch holding up requested DVD shipments. They didn’t wait for customers to notice; they were proactive in admitting the error, apologizing for it, and making up for it.

• Do you openly explain to customers when something goes wrong?
• Do you wait for customers to complain or do you proactively offer a resolution for everyone?
• Which direction is the natural instinct inside your company?

Customer experiences are delivered year after year in many industries without challenging or changing process, policy or approach in what they do.  And when questioned the answer is “this is how we always do this.”  And then they wonder why they don’t stand out in the marketplace.

Perhaps the answer is that they never took the time to determine how they would stand out.

The banking industry is one of those perennially steadfast industries. Standing firm on legacy practices and policies, there is real opportunity for those who grasp that customers will respond to an experience delivered from their point of view.

Just recently, new research by Peppers & Rogers shows that “experience” in retail banking is essentially lacking. Their key findings included that less than one-third of the banks surveyed have a clear definition of their customer experience. I call this ‘clarity of purpose.’  And it is one of the key defining characteristics of organizations that thrive in good times and bad. Clarity of purpose unites the organization from executing tasks to delivering an experience customers want to experience and tell others about.  It unleashes the organization’s ability across the silos – to make decisions guided by its purpose, its promise.

Umpqua Bank Decided to Get Rid of the Ropes.

We’ve all stood in that bank line. Walking between two ropes that force us into a single-file lane, we shuffle slowly, waiting our turn, with nothing to do but watch the person at the counter, look at our watches, and wait for it all to be over. And if there’s a request that the teller can’t handle, there’s another line, and more shuffling. Well, they got rid of those ropes and the lines at Umpqua Bank. As part of Umpqua’s metamorphosis from “bank” to “store,” led by CEO Ray Davis, they shed the ropes and most standard banking practices to get rid of the feeling that banking was a chore.

Here CEO Ray Davis Explains His Decision to Change Umpqua’s Purpose:

Umpqua Bank has a quirky, lighthearted nature for a financial services company, perhaps because they started with the simple goal to help loggers and farmers with their banking. But despite their heartfelt purpose of being “the loggers’ bank,” customer experiences prior to 1994 were not consistently strong. Service levels varied from one day to the next, from one teller to the next. I call this “biorhythmic” service, in which customer experiences vary by service provider and by what kind of day he or she is having. Observing Umpqua’s lack of a clear customer-service approach, CEO Ray Davis decided to make a change. In a move away from traditional banking, he renamed Umpqua locations “stores.” In redesigned “stores,” “shoppers” could browse products and services, stay as long as they wanted, sit a spell with their legs up on a comfy chair, and sip a cup of coffee. And when they were ready, they could tap an Umpqua associate to help them with their banking needs—all without the red ropes.

At Umpqua, customers are not herded into a line for service, and they don’t have to stand in separate lines to get different services. Dedicated associates assist each customer from start to finish.

Decide with Clarity to Shed Old Industry Practices

“Umpqua Bank is part Internet café, part community center, and part bank. The coffee’s good and it’s not a bad place to sit and read a book.” By shedding old industry practices and warming up and humanizing the experience of banking, Umpqua draws customers to them. Through transforming banking into an enjoyable shopping experience, its original five branches from 1994 are now part of a bank network of over 148 “stores,” across two states with more than $8.6 billion in assets. And they continue to grow! This recent article announces their increasing expansion in their market area.

Do you have your own version of banking lines that you make customers shuffle through to get help from you? Can you find a way to get rid of your version of the “red ropes”?

267,000 YouTube views and counting – customer’s photos now sell Domino’s pizza for them!

"If we're going to be real and honest about the taste of our product, we want to be as authentic as possible about how it looks," says Russell Weiner, Domino's CMO.

In late June, Domino’s began reaching out to consumers in a photo contest where they gave $6,000 to 12 people ($500 each) who submit the best unretouched photos of Domino's pizzas. The winning shots are also "likely" to end up in ads, says the chain. The site they set up, called "Show Us Your Pizza," has thousands of pictures of pizzas—often accompanied by dogs, babies or kittens.

On that site Russell Wiener, Chief Marketing Officer, makes this set of promises:

“Here at Domino's, we don't think our inspired Domino's pizza needs the ‘extra’ things typically done to food at photo shoots to look mouth watering. Our pizza is good enough to stand on its own. That's why we're making the following promises about how we photograph our pizzas from this day forward.”

• We will only photograph real honest to goodness pizzas.

That means fresh from our own ovens, with exactly the same ingredients we deliver to your doorstep. Nothing else added.

• Our employees will make the pizza we shoot.
  

Not an art director or model maker or food stylist. A Domino's employee trained to make pizzas the only way they know how: by hand.

• We will not artificially manipulate the food we shoot.
  

No tweezers, no steam guns, no model knives cutting perfect perforations in the cheese. The only thing that will touch the pizzas we shoot is the pizza-maker's hands and a standard Domino's pizza cutter.

Traditionally, just to get a shot of pizza to sell you, a food stylist (now that’s a job I want!) would spend at least a half-hour of preparation, and require up to 129 other people’s involvement on a photo shoot to make your mouth water for a $6 buck piece of pizza!

But no more. Domino’s is taking it to the people and the people are responding enthusiastically.

This connects directly back to one of the core ways that Beloved Companies decide to grow. They decide to “Be there” – by providing products and services from their customer’s point of view.

These companies connect with customers by being bold enough to get out from behind the corporate packaging (literally, in this case) and connect human to human with their customers. This often leads to new and unexpected methods of product development, as customers have a hand in product design and feedback, because they feel a real connection with the organization, and believe it’s worth their time to invest their time.

Take Threadless T-shirts as another example of a company that thrives because of customer involvement. Threadless.com sells out of every product they sell because their T-shirts are designed voted on, and bought by their customer community of over 700,000 members. Beloved companies tap the passionate energy of their customers to grow and prosper.

In the beginning, the “Threadless” community was created to give artists and designers a place to submit their design ideas and give those designs a home—on the unexpected canvas of a T-shirt. This idea exploded into a fast-growing community. Customers embraced the idea of being involved in the design, selection, and the purchasing of the products they had a hand in creating. As a result, the Threadless.com community exploded.

Domino’s Pizza and Threadless.com are two companies striving to involve their customers, and because they encourage this active participation these companies continue to grow and prosper.
Here’s your challenge question from my book, 'I Love You More than My Dog: Five Decisions for Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad.'

Go try this to blur your line between your customers and your company:

1. Review your product development cycle. Where does it begin? With your customers, or with your own internal priorities? Make sure research and development doesn’t start until you’ve talked to customers.
2. Ask your customers to contribute. Find your version of Domino’s asking customers to send in pizza pictures or Threadless asking customers to submit designs.
3. If you are subscribe and use the Net Promoter® methodology, reach out to your “Promoters.” Ask them to come in quarterly and participate with you in product design, improvement and brainstorming. These folks already have an affinity for you and will likely jump at the chance to participate in improving a company they love.

Want to learn about other tools to help you earn customers who drive the success and growth of your business? Pick up a copy of: 'I Love You More Than My Dog: Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad.'