NFIB

The One-Month Customer-Information Blitz
06/ 24/ 2002

As a small-business owner, you undoubtedly recognize the need to become as informed as possible about your customers. While there's nothing wrong with hiring marketing experts to survey your customer base, you have a much quicker and less expensive means of finding out all you need to know about why your customers do business with you--and to use that information as the basis for strengthening your business. Jeffrey Moses explains in today's Workshop.

One of the easiest and least expensive ways to learn about your customers is "The One-Month Customer-Information Blitz," which involves nothing more than having all your customers fill out a one-page, comprehensive form that gathers information about their preferences, reasons for doing business with you and personal data.

Your employees will be called upon to encourage customers to fill out the form. Employees should be entirely straightforward when explaining the form to customers, saying something to the effect of: "We'd like you to fill out this form, which we're going to use to improve our offerings to you and find out exactly what our customers expect of us. This information will be only for us and won't be shared with anyone else. This is very important to us, and we value your participation."

Consider offering a small but enticing gift to all who fill out the form, such as a 10% discount on their purchase. However, you'll likely find that most customers will fill out the form without being offered an enticement.

Design the form in a page layout program on your computer or take it to a graphic designer. It should be attractive and look official, with your company logo or emblem at the top.

Collect the following information:

1. Customer name and address (reiterate on the form that this information will not be given out to any other store or organization)
2. Customer age, gender, marital status, ages of children, number of grandchildren
3. Frequency of shopping in the store or using your services
4. Annual household income
5. How the customer feels about the following aspects of your store (rated from one to four, with four being the highest): price, customer service/employee commitment, quality of merchandise or services provided, convenience and guarantees
6. Type of products or services purchased
7. Suggestions for new products or services to be added
8. Specific aspects of your store that the customer likes or dislikes
9. Names of competitors with whom they also do business
10. How they learned about your store
11. Additional comments

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