It’s a well known fact that unhappy customers tend to tell their colleagues about their bad experiences. But research by US firm TARP shows that for every 26 unhappy customers, only one will lodge a formal complaint with Management. This then results in up to 1,560 people hearing about at least one of these bad experiences.

The biggest barrier to a customer registering their feedback is a combination of valuing their own time and the idea that the feedback won’t be actioned in any meaningful way.

So why not kill two birds with one stone? Offer the convenience of an online feedback form that not only chronicles customer feedback but also gives you an opportunity to win customers back.

A great example of a feedback form that gets a lot of traffic for one of our clients can be found at www.nationaltiles.com.au/feedback.htm. While the feedback may not be positive 100% of the time, the customer is still giving the company an opportunity to do something about their complaint rather than heading over to one of the competitors.

Remember too that asking for feedback alone is not enough - you must make the commitment to establish an effective customer feedback response process that addresses each issue that arises. In doing so, you not only encourage people to continue giving you feedback (because they know that you’ll do something about it), but research also shows that between 54-70 percent of business from complaining customers can be won back if the process is handled promptly and professionally.

Finally, any kind of feedback is really free market research for you to build future marketing strategies on. So why not run a competition that requires entrants to respond to 10 quick questions via your feedback form? It’s quick and easy for them (no postage required) and it’s critical information for you.

Many of you may have heard about blogs. Short for Web Log, a blog is an online diary that captures important opinions, valuable articles or very bizarre ruminations. Blogs can be kept by anyone, from CEO’s, MP’s, School Principals or just people with interesting lives - if someone might read it, there’s a person’s blog to cater for it. The beauty of blogs is that they provide very specific information, be it subjective, on millions of different topics.

And what topic could be more important than your business. Let’s look at a few examples of how blogs could be used to great effect in your business:

Example 1, for medium to large businesses: The blog has become a valuable tool for CEO’s to keep an open line to their entire organisation. Previously, many employees may have complained about not knowing what the future direction was of the company they worked for; that an annual address at the AGM or Christmas Party just didn’t cut it. Now a weekly entry by the CEO to his or her blog that has its link to sent to staff keeps those employees feeling that the old "silo" effect is a thing of the past. Government departments, medical institutions and the education sector are particularly good examples of this.

Example 2, for small businesses: One of the hardest aspects of developing a small business is building credibility. Granted, you can spend 5 years developing a client  list that helps spread the word about your products and services. Or you can position yourself as an expert  in your field NOW by writing regular articles about your area of expertise in your blog. Are there competitors who know more about your industry? Maybe. But how many of them promote that expertise beyond their annual catalogue or a 3 inch ad in the local paper? Not many.

And who will subscribe to this blog, you ask? The same customers who provide their email addresses to you via your contact us page on your website, that goldmine of leads that may not buy from you this month, or next month, but maybe the month after that, or at the very least, tell their friends about you.

Have you ever noticed a company’s logo appearing next to their web address in your browser’s address window, like this Qantas example? Usually, your browser’s default symbol would appear (e.g. the Internet Explorer ‘e’), but it can be customised to a company’s logo, something that we in the web industry call a "favicon" (short for "favourite icon"). Look through your own favourites list and you will probably notice that the companies that have used favicons are usually pretty prominent companies including banks, airlines and established internet brands like Amazon and Ebay.

Favicons are a cheap and easy way to start pushing your brand, no matter how far into its infancy it may be. If somebody said to you that they were going to place your company’s logo in a spot where potential customers visit nearly every day, you would probably leap at the chance, especially if they said the cost was virtually nothing.

To make matters even more relevant, with the release of Google Notebooks last year (a service that allows Google users to keep their favourites online so they can access them anywhere), it’s becoming increasingly apparent that search engines may start to rank websites in the future based on what visitors deem important enough to bookmark.