John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, has an excellent commentary and video on the value of customer feedback at Cisco: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac50/ac208/about_cisco_approach_to_quality_customer_sat_survey.html

Unfortunately for most ambitious CEOs, a customer satisfaction survey is not enough. A complete customer feedback system needs to provide you with more information. A well designed customer satisfaction survey, as Cisco is conducting, will help you with setting priorities for the organization, resolve trade-off decisions, productivity and efficiency programs, and hiring and resource allocation. In addition, it generates scores for identified topics and departments, measures loyalty and satisfaction and identifies at risk customers. I like John's comment which is to tie corporate bonuses to survey results.

The additional topics, to be included in the customer satisfaction survey or to be conducted as a separate survey are:

•Determine your industry trend and customers' overall opinion;
•Understand the reasons why they bought your products and services;
•Identify their "hot buttons" for your PR and advertising campaigns;
•Justifying/modifying your future platform/product focus;
•Understand customer's service requirements to shape your potential service addition;
•Determine feature gaps as an opportunity for new product introductions;
•Create a template for your sales team to better target the right prospects that meet the profile
of your existing customers to shorten your sales cycles; and
•Focus your budget to assure you're going after the right prospects to meet your revenue goals.

You not only want to use your customer feedback system as a customer satisfaction tool, but to help your marketing, product management, sales and public relations departments to align their activities and to answer their dilemmas.

Best,
Michael