1. Change your survey to “loyalty based” questions and responses. In most cases all you need to do is add the words why or how to the front of your existing “customer satisfaction survey.”

2. Have the staff necessary to document and discern the information. Your customers will be answering in sentence form. This means someone will have to read the answers, transpose them to a computer and distribute them to the people they affect.

3. Meet regularly to determine what needs to change. Vote on what and what order new actions will be taken. If you just implement one suggestion or new strategy a week, at the end of the year you’re 52 ways better than you were.

4. Have the money and the staff necessary to turn the information into action. Talking about things is way different from doing them. Most of the time new ideas are not implemented because of a “lack of budget,” or it’s evil twin, “lack of manpower.”

5. Adjust your advertising budgets and customer retention budgets to at least equal. This may be the hardest task. Take half your advertising budgets and spend it on existing customers. Create an army of people talking about you — not a bunch of self-righteous drivel about “we’re the greatest.”

6. Benchmark (document) all your daily practices and develop a “best response” for each one. Each person handles the same situation with different words and actions. Wrong. Document the best way to handle the top 25 customer interfaces in your business and train your people to it the best way EVERY time.

6.5 Your employees care about themselves, not you. Train your people to be the best they can be for themselves, before you brain-wash them with a bunch of your policy crap. If you help them be the best they can be for themselves, then (and only then) can you teach them the “best responses” for each situation they’re likely to incur.

c 1999 All Rights Reserved – Don’t even think about reproducing this document without written

permission from Jeffrey Gitomer and Buy Gitomer www.gitomer.com 704/333-1112