In today’s highly competitive business environment, understanding your target audience and how your product or service offerings differ from the competition’s is especially important. That’s where customer satisfaction research comes in. You need to ask your customers how your company is performing in their eyes, rather than make an educated guess about what they think of your business.

Although the word “research” may instill fear in growing business owners, Adrian Miller, president of Adrian Miller Sales Training, offers these two easy and inexpensive ways to collect valuable information about your market segments:

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• Take an online survey. Sites like Survey Monkey and Zoomerang offer free hosting for basic surveys and inexpensive plans for more intricate ones. Although their surveys are easy to use, Miller advises that, for them to be truly effective, they must be paired with some kind of email database. Even a perfectly crafted online survey will not work if you have no way of effectively distributing it.

• Stay on the phone for an extra minute. Instead of simply saying a polite goodbye after an inbound call, end with “And while we’re on the phone…” Even one or two simple questions can go a long way. Customers will appreciate that you’ve taken a sincere interest in them after they bothered to call you. Just be sure not to ask too many (or complicated) questions, Miller warns, as this could have the opposite effect and annoy your customers.

— Jessica Saint Jean

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