One of the most effective methods for growing and improving upon your current business is to solicit feedback regarding your products or services directly from your customers. There are many ways the information you attain from customers can be valuable, including:

Gauge overall customer satisfaction - You can see just how satisfied your customers are, and if they aren't, ask them exactly what the problem was and what you can do to fix it. For customers that are satisfied, you can learn more about what they like about your company.

Estimating customer loyalty - You can gauge the likelihood that a customer will use your products or services again through their survey answers.

Gauge effectiveness of marketing campaigns - By simply asking the client how they found out about your company, you can see what marketing campaigns are bringing in the sales and which are not, and make adjustments to your marketing efforts accordingly.

Estimate interest in new products and services - You can present the customer with sample products and services that you have not yet launched and get their feedback on whether they would be interested in it.

Test new products and services - You can invite current customers to try out a new product or service before you make it available to the public. Then use follow-up surveys to find out how well the product or service is liked, what can be improved and even how to price it.

Reveal demographics - By surveying your customers, you can ask them specific questions about who they are and use that demographic information to target your marketing efforts.

Gain a competitive advantage - You can ask if the customer has tried your competitors products or services and find out what differences drew the customer to or away from your business and to or from your competitor.

Price better - Ask your customers about your prices and see if they would consider paying more for certain services or if they would purchase more if a certain package was priced less. You can even get the exact price points for which a customer deems something to be too expensive to purchase or too inexpensive to purchase.

Pre-sales information - If a customer comes to your website and puts items in their cart, but fails to follow through with the transaction, then you can have a survey pop up asking why they abandoned their cart. This can help you discover problems with your ordering process.

Surveys are cost effective - Getting feedback from your customers through surveys is very inexpensive. You can do it in-house, by calling, emailing or setting up a web form. Or you can use a third party service like SurveyMonkey.com, which makes it very simple and easy to create, implement and analyze customer feedback surveys.

With the customer data you receive, you can further analyze and refine your course of business, customer service guidelines, packages, pricing and marketing. Careful analysis of this data can help you to increase your business, but most of all, increase sales and overall customer satisfaction.