Colin Wahl. Seasoned entrepreneur Colin Wahl has a long history of business success. Colin is the founder and CEO of Client Opinions, a company that provides an automated, continuous means to capture and measure customer feedback.

Most recently, Colin was an Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School. Prior to that, he was founder/CEO of InvestorForce, Inc., a firm that provides technology for conducting online investment research. Prior to that, he founded and led research-based marketing consulting firms. Earlier in his career, Colin was a vice president at SEI Investments, and a brand manager with P&G.

Three Questions to Ask Your Customers A company doesn't really have a choice about whether or not it is going to get customer feedback. Customers will give you their feedback by firing you, keeping you out of an RFP or in some other manner. The only choice you have is how you choose to get customer feedback. You have a simple decision: seek it proactively or deal with it reactively. It seems to me to be a clear choice. If you get feedback early and proactively, it's actionable. If you get it late, there's not much you can do about it; you've already eroded your credibility, or worse, lost the customer's business.

In my opinion (albeit a biased one), it's very difficult, if not impossible, to collect unbiased customer feedback on your own. There is a real art to phrasing questions, structuring a questionnaire, and interpreting the results so as not to introduce statistical bias that will skew your results. Customers are also more open and candid in providing feedback to an independent third-party expert.

Every successful firm should implement a formal “Voice of the Customer” program that captures continuous, unbiased, and measurable feedback. This program transforms customer research from an ad hoc process to a continuous process of proactively identifying new business opportunities and uncovering issues before they become problems.

Three key questions can tell you a lot about how you interact with your customers, how well they understand your business, and how you can best improve what you do.

1. How satisfied are your customers? There are really two levels of satisfaction:

• Emotional Satisfaction: How satisfied are customers with their relationship with your firm. Do they like you?
• Product Satisfaction: Do customers like the quality of your offerings? Having a good relationship buys you some capital with the customer; but that runs out quickly if your products are poor.

2. Are you doing the right things right? We are always surprised at how many businesses do a great job on things customers simply don't care about! You might be sinking money into something you think is critical, but after asking your customers, find that it's not something important to them. Ask your customers what is important to them and invest your money against those few things that customers deem to be mission-critical.

3. How well do your customers know your portfolio of products and services? It's not uncommon to see less than a 50 percent customer awareness of a company's products and services. If your firm offers multiple products or services, take time now to understand customer awareness. If you have 10 products, and 3 years from now you learn your customers were only aware of 2 of them, think of the lost revenue you can never recoup. Existing clients are by far the best prospects. They’re already predisposed to buying from you and simply educating them on your full range of offerings can often generate qualified sales leads.

And last, remember that all of your competitors are calling on your customers. Asking your customers "what are competitors doing that we should be doing?" is a great way to get new insight into your business.