Are you responsible for growing your business through the addition of strategic partnerships or joint ventures? When I assumed this added responsibility, I started brainstorming a list of good partners with my team. After looking at the list, it was full of other financial service companies, but nothing else. After seeing the responses to a blog post I had just written about ways to show our appreciation, it became clear the types of services that our customers were interested in.

One of the common responses I heard from customers was, "You helped me take care of my life insurance, now can you help me find products and services that will help me be healthier so that I never have to cash in my policy?" Health and wellness was never even a category that made my initial list, but the more people commented about it, the more it made sense.

Once again, the feedback from our customers helped streamline the effort of myself and my team. The result was immediate and targeted outreach to companies that had the products and services our customers wanted. In this search, we started building a couple of strong symbiotic partnerships that have resonated with our customers, created depth of content on our site and given us another pillar for referral business.

Consumers in general do not expect companies to ask their opinion but embrace the opportunity when asked. The result of asking for our customers' feedback via email and on our blog have allowed us to have better focus with business development as well as make customer-centric process changes faster and with fewer errors. In addition, these customers have shown us their appreciation with their wallets.

Every single time we reach out to our customers, they reach back out to us by giving us incremental business in the form of additional insurance policies for themselves or referrals of friends and family.