How to make good use of web site "listening posts".

With the development of tiny Web-based "listening posts," it seems that we have come full circle in our ability to get instant feedback from our customers. In the old days, most banks--and businesses for that matter--were small and the managers sat right there on the banking floor and could sense when things were not quite right. There was no need then for consumer research, attitude polls, mystery shoppers or other formalized statistical methods to gauge customer satisfaction. If something occurred that rubbed customers the wrong way, customers would complain right there to the manager. The manager, who was always sitting close by, served as a listening post.

Inevitably, though, things changed. Banks became bigger, enabled by a combination of technology, economies of scale, permissible laws and encouragement from the financial markets. In the process, unfortunately, customers became "smaller" as managers moved off" the banking floor to upper-level offices, and in today's world, to distant cities where it is hard to listen to local customers.

But today's emerging Internet-based technologies are changing this. Not only is the Internet enabling customers to obtain just-in-time transactions, account information, and other services from the comfort of their own home, it is also enabling bankers to "listen" to their clients from across an ever-widening footprint.

While customer surveys have long been a device to keep managers informed on the successes or failures of marketing strategies, the data gathering (processing) costs valuable time.

Today, more and more businesses, including banks, are beginning to deploy "listening posts" on their Web sites. These include a variety of traditional, but online surveys that can gather and report customer attitudes with almost no latency. But the most novel and interesting "listening post" is the tiny "Please Rate Our--" applications, where the blank might be "Web site," "bill pay service," "online statements," "new banking hours," or just about anything you might want to know about. These applications typically invite customers to rate a subject on a bad to good numerical scale, say 1 to 10, plus include a "comment." They are easy to understand because they are tiny and visual. They compliment customers because they invite their input.

In addition to placing these little applications on Web sites, marketers are increasingly putting them and longer surveys as well into e-mails and sending them to customers for feedback. The e-mails are brief and invite customers to click a link and answer a few simple questions. They are always anonymous and never ask for any kind of identifying information. The advantages to this sort of digital data gathering are enormous. The surveys and listening posts are connected directly to online databases, so results can be seen immediately, much like election day results when votes are tabulated and the whiner announced before the evening news. Also, this method of data gathering is less expensive, since the cost of deploying a tiny Web application on a Web site or in an e-mail is next to nothing.

While it is certainly necessary for marketers to continue doing periodic strategic satisfaction surveys containing 20 or more questions on a range of competitive variables like products, pricing and promotion, the new little listening posts can help us in our day-to-day fine-tuning of our operations. Besides, who among us has ever been accused of listening too much?

L. Biff Motley, CFMP, is Senior Vice President Retail Banking and Marketing, Whitney Bank, New Orleans. He can be reached at [phone].