Your business exists to meet your customer’s needs and the better you can meet those needs the more successful your business will become. Having a record of your clients experiences with your company over time will give you perspective on your performance and direction on how you can improve to become more profitable.

There are two very simple ways you can get valuable feedback from your clients: create a printed comment card and/or build a comment form for your website. Both these solutions make it simple for your customer to let you know how you’re doing and they’re easy for you too.

A successful comment card or comment form doesn’t just collect random information – it’s really designed to answer specific questions, in this case how well your business meets your customers needs based on a statistical sampling of your clients.

You don’t want your comment card or form to take more than about 5 minutes to fill out but at the very least your comment card or form should include space for the date, customer contact information, and a section for open comments.

Check boxes for statements or category rankings are much quicker to fill out for the customer and allow for simple evaluation on your end.

If you want to be able to categorize your hair salon clients, for example, to market additional products or services you may ask:

Which of the following statements best describe you?

[ ] I follow the latest trends and I describe exactly what I want.
[ ] I take my hair stylists’ advice to keep my look current.
[ ] I’ve got the look I want and need my stylist to maintain it.
[ ] I’m OK with a little change; I want to update my hairstyle but only now and then.

Armed with the answers to these questions you’d be able to target future sales of highest fashion, more risque products and styles to those who identify with the first statement; and the new, but more traditional, products and styles to those who identify with the second statement.

Your comment card or comment form can provide you with the answers to anything you might be wondering about your business, you only have to ask, make it fast and easy to answer, and if indicated by the results, respond with appropriate changes to your business.

With the advent of Facebook and MySpace, Twitter and Linked-In there are all kinds of ways to interact with your customers online.  Back on your website, you’re the king and (it’s good to be the king because) you can say all the wonderful things you’d like to share with the world completely unchallenged – but traditional Web 1.0 websites don’t really provide an interactive environment for your customers.

But why would you want to go to the trouble of interacting like this online?  Web 2.0 websites are more than just gradients, white space and striped backgrounds – they’re really about engaging customers.  Both companies and customers are asking questions and getting answers online on Facebook Pages and Twitter feeds.

But where’s the value?  What’s the payoff?  Customers who are happy with your services are giving you live testimonials, using their positive experience to inform others that they too will have these positive experiences when working with your company.  With customers sharing their opinions so freely you can much more easily see how well received a new product or initiative is, and likely, if it’s not going well, how they’d like to see it improved so you can react faster and better meet your customers’ needs sooner.

That’s all well and good but what about actual complaints?  If a customer has a complaint, you want to know about it.  It’s great to deal with whatever it is at the time the situation occurs but a customer who makes time to complain on your website will also spend his social time sharing his negative experience with his friends, family and colleagues.  Without an outlet like Facebook, Twitter or MySpace your company would be the only one that didn’t hear the complaint. This customer is giving you an opportunity to repair your relationship and impress him with your customer service so that he ends up sharing a positive story featuring your company with his personal and professional networks.  And, when this resolution is done in an open forum, such as on Twitter or your Facebook Page, you also showcase your professionalism and dedication to customer service to the general public, your potential customers.

Comments from any customer, whether positive or negative, give you a better understanding of how well you’re meeting your customers’ needs and that’s what it’s all about.  Companies that best meet the wants and needs of their customers are the most successful.

While it can feel like a chore to keep your website up to date, letting it languish could cost you dearly.

If you’ve taken the time to put together a fantastic sales event, you wouldn’t attempt to run the sale without telling people about it.  You’d probably put up a sign, take out an ad, decorate your store, contact your customers, and maybe even put up posters or hand out flyers all in an effort to reach as many people as possible.  So why wouldn’t you do the same on your website?

Updating your own site can be fast and easy for the average person and even not too difficult for non-computer people if your website is built on a content management system or CMS like Joomla or Drupal, or if it’s built on a Blog platform like WordPress or Blogger.

We’ve been converting standard website designs into WordPress design themes so that our clients can log-in to a simple web interface, quickly and easily update their own site content, add their own pictures and generally keep their own websites up to date.  Ask us how your current site can be converted so you can keep your website current.

Search Engines love blogs and as a website owner you should too.  You’re an expert at what you do so share a little bit of your experience with the world and you’ll also encourage the search engines to crawl your website.

Since you’re already writing about the subject of your website it won’t be hard to incorporate any number of keywords or keyphrases and possible search terms offering even more encouragement for the search engines to visit your site and rank it as more relevant to your site’s subject.  Which in turn gives people using those search engines more reason to choose your site over your competitors’ site.

Write about what you know and work towards establishing yourself as an expert in your field.  On top of search engine traffic, if your blog is helpful and informative, you can develop loyal followers who could be your potential customers or like-minded professionals with whom to network.

The best news is that incorporating a blog to your existing website is relatively simple in most cases.  A blog integration can be seamless, looking exactly the same as your existing website or it can visually compliment or contrast your site and brand.

For every email, coupon, promotion, flyer, or poster you make or send out build a specific landing page on your site geared towards the next step in the sale for your specific customer.

Every click to that page tells you exactly how many people are interested in what you’re offering and you’re thanking them for their interest by welcoming them to your site and ushering them directly to the heart of the reason they’ve chosen to visit; what they want is all the applicable additional information about your offer or promotion.  You know that’s what they want because that’s what the button they clicked on offered them.

And for every further click to purchase or sign-up (or whatever next action you’re asking them to take) you know how many people were satisfied by your offer and how many weren’t interested given the additional information.

I know not everyone had the benefit of a formal education in operations management so believe me when I tell you: “If you can’t measure, it you can’t manage it!” So get your landing pages built and measure your success more accurately so you can repeat it again and again.

Interface Media Group Inc. releases it’s all new website, version 3.1. The new website is on the Wordpress platform, and resurrects our long-since-departed IMG Tech Blog in an expanded blog format.

The new website incorporates a custom design from our Creative Director, Jennifer Faccin, along with many exciting web technologies: XHTML and CSS; the jQuery javascript library; Flash CS3 with ActionScript 3.0; and the PHP/MySQL Wordpress platform.

IMG will be doing a blog micro-series on the steps taken to develop the new website from concept to finished product over the coming weeks.

Website features: custom skin (or design) for WordPress content management system – website owners easily update content, sleek and simple ecommerce store with shopping cart, online shipping calculator, enewsletter sign-up with auto reponses.

Watch for the new Rugrats Gear website coming soon!: www.RugratsGear.com

Website Features: custom skin (or design) for WordPress content management system – website owners easily update content, sleek and simple ecommerce store with shopping cart, secure online sales through PayPal.

Visit the Canadian Poken website www.StartPoken.ca and visit the USA Poken website www.StartPoken.com