Looking for ways to improve your service? I hope so. In today's world where consumers have higher standards for levels of service, businesses can no longer become complacent with their existing service processes. Companies like Go Daddy that are fanatical about their astronomical degree of customer service have risen to the top of the food chain in their industry, while others have crashed and burned.

While corporate executives regularly sit around and make service decisions based on saving money with streamlined processes, these are the same people who shrug their shoulders when consumers vocally attack their poor service. These decisions to save money end up costing more money in the long run.

The question I regularly ask myself is: What is the best process I can develop to provide remarkable service to my customers? I'm not unique in this respect. There are plenty of great companies that ask the same question. The pitfall that many run into is that they come up with their answers in a vacuum without soliciting feedback from the people that matter most -- the people who actually use your products or services.

If you have a company blog, this is a great mechanism to ask these types of questions. At AccuQuote, we used our blog early on for this purpose. In a post titled, "Open Thread for Feedback - Insight Into How We Think at AccuQuote," I took the time to share a story about how we think as a company. I followed this thought by putting it out there that we want to hear suggestions for improving our service. In addition to posting on our blog, we packaged the blog post into an email and sent it out to our customers.

The response was outstanding.

Customers were vocal, either letting us know that they loved our service, or in the case of not so stellar service, our customers pointed out our shortcomings and gave recommendations to improve. We gave our customers the option of responding to us via the blog as well as via email.

When soliciting feedback, it's important to do the following:

• Provide multiple methods for giving feedback. In our case, it was possible to respond on our blog as well as via email.
• Respond back to everyone via whatever mechanism they provided the response, to acknowledge that you appreciate that they took the time to give you the feedback you were looking for.
• Take the feedback you receive and start to categorize the responses in order to aggregate the data.
• Prioritize the improvement areas and take action!