New businesses struggle generally for the first two years of their life so if your company or business is in the infant stage how can you increase its chances of survival?

We here at Web-Empire have been looking into this in the hope of aiding our customers and in doing so we have come to the conclusion that to help our customers we have to help them help their customers.

Customer feed back is essential, whether positive or negative. Giving your customers an outlet for their complaints – however annoying you find it – may well save your business. If the dissatisfied customer feels they have been listened to they are actually more likely to praise your business than a customer who thought your service or product was brilliant in the first place.

Not only this but a customer who feels they have not been listened too can do untold damage to a small or medium sized business. They will tell somewhere in the region of ten people who – being people – love passing on bad news, and so will tell several more people each. This would not seem so bad except that businesses of this size still rely most heavily on word of mouth regardless of their advertising budget.

According to Paul Graham feedback from customers is even more important than just keeping them sweet so they don’t bad mouth your company. He says that it will help you track what their needs actually are giving you the chance to adapt or learn from mistakes. He also has a few more useful tidbits for young companies or those considering starting one up.

But how can small companies manage the time and resources needed for this sort of customer service? There are many solutions, such as call centres which give the appearance of a dedicated helpline but these can be prohibitively expensive initially. But feedback forms and frequently ask question (FAQ) on your web-site may be useful as long as you actually answer respond to them.

We here at Web-Empire consider that these are indispensable on e-commerce online shops and encourage our customers to include them.

Another solution is for a company to have a profile on sites such as http://www.getsatisfaction.com/ they even help prioritise feedback so that you can respond to the most urgent first, useful if you are getting a lot of feedback! Part of what we do here at Web-Empire is knowing about such sites and helping customers us it – we will even set profiles up for our customers if thats what they want.

Some situations may even call for a support forum for customers where they can share uses for your products or even iron out any bugs themselves!

We hope this has been useful.

From all of us here at Web-Empire