Last summer I had the pleasure of climbing Mt. Rainier with entrepreneur and author Christopher Gergen.

Christopher is a visionary. The concepts of developed by Christopher and co-author Greg Vanourek in their book, Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives, are powerfully relevant in today’s economy and society.

In the book, Gergen and Vanourek synthesize findings based on interviews with over 50 entrepreneurs, gleaning lessons on blending life, work and purpose. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or not, I highly recommend this timely book.

PS. I let Christopher in on one of my little secrets, which he’s faithfully kept between him, me and the readers of U.S. News & World Report. Oh, well. Now you know!

 Does every employee on your front line know what’s expected when a customer walks through the door? That moment can be a defining one for most companies. How you evaluate your success on this issue says as much about your business as does the grade you get.

Over the years we’ve come to advise our clients not to create a specific time frame on how quickly customers are greeted or, for that matter, overly rigid rules about what that employee should say.

Why? We think that the interaction at the front door is too important to leave to a simple formula. Rather, we’d like to know that employees understand your overarching objectives and are then using their own social skills to do the right thing based on what they see. Customers are always glad to tell you if your employees are making these decisions well.

“I felt welcome.” We learned a great way to ask customers what happened when they walked in the door from one of our favorite Northwest companies – Hanna Andersson. This Portland-based retailer of high-quality children’s apparel likes to ask if its customers “felt welcome” when they walked in the door.

The Skills We All Have. What I’ve always loved about Hanna Andersson’sapproach to this is how it puts the responsibility on each employee to use their best judgment on how to greet a customer based on the circumstances. People – your people – generally have good social skills.They can naturally spot a person who’s looking for a gregarious welcome, and one who might be more comfortable with a lower-key greeting.

Think about that. Would you be able to tell me whether or not you made people walking through your door feel welcome? I bet you could.Wouldn’t you get a better results if I left the details up to you instead of instructing you to greet everyone with a certain phrase within 10 seconds?

Putting the onus on employees to determine the best way to greet individuals through the door is a good idea — especially when you consistently show them how customers rate that interaction. It results in customers who feel comfortable spending time in your business, asking questions, and getting to know your team.

Last week’s post on tapping into the contact information your customers volunteer when they grade their experience with your organization garnered a ton of feedback — and requests for more details.

This week we asked marketing guru Rich Carr, CEO of Carr Knowledge, to share his thoughts on typical response rates and — more importantly — the essential elements of leveraging this type of information. Feel free toemail Rich your questions. 

 While email open rates differ from site to site, concept to concept, and campaign to campaign, there is absolutely no question that an email that was given to you by a customer is one of the most valuable pieces of information you own. Why? With that email they’re literally saying, “Send me something relevant and I’ll do more business with you.”

An average reported open rate for a typical, reasonably targeted marketing email to an opt-in list would be between 22% - 26%. However, knowing what to send to that list, or segments of that list, can result in openings as high as 80% depending on many variables including subject line, content of the email, day sent, time sent, offer included, behavioral targeting, and many other nuances it takes to court a customer through Email Marketing.

What’s more important than the Open Rate is the Conversion Rate - also known as Return On Investment. Goals should be set for every email that leaves your Outbox with your name on it. If you’re sending an email and you get a low open rate, you’re just not relevant to the receiver.

Email Marketing metrics, a strong strategy, goals on each send, testing and the reporting and segmentation of your email list into groups of customers that react differently to your emails will always result in higher opening rates and higher conversions.

 There is a huge secondary benefit to having a healthy customer feedback platform on the web: A rich database of customers and their contact information that grows every day.

As you read this, people everywhere are going online and grading our client companies. To encourage this we work with our clients to devise an incentive – a bounce-back coupon or a sweepstakes drawing, for instance – to get these customers online and grading.

Survey respondents are generally willing to include their contact information when grading companies they like and trust. They’re even more willing to do so when they’re getting an incentive. After all, we have to contact them if they win.

Most of the people who see customer grades within any organization are operations folks. The VP Stores, Regional, District and Store Managers log in to check grades every day. It’s part of their work process.

But that’s not always true for the marketers in the business. We’re making a point these days of introducing ourselves to the marketing department within our client companies to be sure they’re aware of this potential treasure trove of information – freely available to them!

Most marketers would kill to have lists of their retail customers and their contact information. This information is even better because we also know a great deal about this customer’s last visit based on their grades.

Marketers use this information in a variety of ways, including targeting email offers to their existing customers based on the feedback they gave. Did that customer give a perfect score on the question “I’d recommend you to a friend?” I’m sure your company’s marketing department could help them do that.

Any company with a healthy online customer feedback program has a hugely valuable asset in the contact information customers leave when they grade you. Don’t leave this money on the table.

 Over the past several months we’ve taken a hard look at a subtle – but extremely important – aspect of measuring live customer feedback.What we learned surprised even us.

Slow praise, quick criticism. Companies and franchise organizations use Customerville to allow their own customers to grade them. They check these grades via the web. Our system – and others like it – has the capacity to identify an upset customer, “red flag” that customer’s survey, and alert the appropriate person immediately via email or SMS message. This alert gives that manager a chance to address the situation quickly and save the customer from defecting.

But there can be an unintended consequence: These managers end up getting proactive, real-time feedback about things that are bad, butpassive and significantly slower feedback about things that are going well.

Why it creates problems. The psychological effects on front-line managers seem obvious, though it took us years to fully come to terms with them. In some circumstances and over time, front-line managers and franchisees can come to associate customer feedback with criticism.Worse, this negative emotional association can create an aversion to paying attention to important customer information.

Positively true. Ironically, most customer comments are extremely positive. We generally find that customer comments are either mostly positive or exclusively positive over 85% of the time. At its best, customer feedback is used as a positive, uplifting leadership tool. This red flag trap, as we’ve come to call it, creates a distorted view of that reality.

This year will see us spending even more time studying this pitfall and working with our clients on ways to avoid it. We think this is so important that we’ve focused two out of the next three upgrades currently in development on addressing and preventing the red flag trap.

One of our all-time favorite lines comes from the movie City Slickers, where veteran actor Jack Palance tells his urban charges that the secret of life is to focus on “just one thing.” His point – lost on Billy Crystal and the gang at the time – was that the “thing” is different for everyone. The secret is just to have something on which to dedicate yourself.

We frequently get asked questions about how to start sharing customer grades with employees. We promise never to take ourselves so seriously as to think we’ll be the guiding philosophy in anyone’s life, but we do think that Jack Palance had it right: focus on just one thing.

It hardly matters what the “thing” is. Just start with a low grade on the store report, let everyone know that it’s the thing we’re going to fix, share ideas on how we fix it. Then circle it with a big red pen and promise to come back in a week and share the grades.

I’ve attached a terrific chart which one of our clients shared with us. The store team started by identifying one question – and temporarily ignoring all the rest – as a big area where they needed to improve. After only a week the grade started to improve.

Just as important is what happened to the rest of the grades – many of those things took care of themselves once customer-facing employees found themselves in the habit of thinking about it.

If we had to pick one “must-do” step that absolutely must go right in any implementation, it would be a launch contest between stores to galvanize awareness among front-line managers.

This week was a special one for me. We launched our platform for Taco Time – a famously successful quick serve restaurant chain in the northwest US which has been a family favorite for us since I was a kid. 

These guys are no dummies, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me when their senior management stepped up - even before we suggested it - with a great contest and a real attention-getter prize for the winning store.

Here are the basics. On the day your company begins gathering customer grades, make a point of also launching a 30-day contest between stores with an award for the highest volume of customer grades. (You can segment this between like-volume stores to keep things fair.)

Note that I said “highest volume”, and not “best” customer grades.Working on improving grades isn’t the first step. That comes after getting front-line teams totally comfortable with their involvement in asking customers for feedback and confident that those grades are a tool for positive guidance – and not a punitive measure.

A great contest does exactly that. It charges the system with plenty of grades, recruits customers into helping you grow and wins employees into a great feedback loop. 

 Enter-to-win sweepstakes drawings are a fantastic way to get customers interested in grading your business. They’re quick, fun and easy to implement. Here are some good things to know about getting this right.

Keep the Farm. I recently saw customer feedback reward drawing for $250,000 and just about went bananas. Let me tell you, if you need to offer your customers a quarter million dollars to tell you what they think of your business, you’ve got problems even we can’t solve!

Our clients nearly always find that a gift-card drawing in the low hundreds of dollars works like a charm. What’s more, you can do the drawing as frequently as you like. Customers tune into the gift card amount, but generally don’t care how frequently you do the drawing. You marketers can almost always find a great PR opportunity around giving the award, too!

Know How To Message. When you advertise or distribute collateral in your stores or restaurants, be sure to get the message right. We usually see the best traffic when the message starts with the headline: Win $XX, and then says “We’d love you to grade us”. The website address should usually be last in line on the page.

Get the Legalese Right. You’ve got to include the rules, and they need to pass muster with your State’s sweepstakes laws. Drop me a line via myprofile email link if you’d like our boilerplate version and I’ll make sure you get it.

Is It Really About The Prize? Here’s the biggest surprise: No. Customerville’s system allows our clients to use either a sweepstakes drawing or a printable gift certificate. The redemption rate of the gift certificates is a tiny fraction of the number issued. In speaking with our clients’ customers, many of them express to us the sentiment that it’s not really about the prize. They love shopping with you and just want to be included, listened to and valued!

A well planned sweepstakes drawing or printable coupon is like a warm “hello” when you meet someone new. It’s not essential to the conversation that will follow, but it sure goes a long way toward whether or not they want to talk.

 Just a few weeks until Ironman Arizona, which means lots of training and lots of time and money spent in my local bike shops!

I keep seeing examples in these stores of a situation that offers much promise – and so much peril – for store chains who sell technical products: Smart employees can help you…or they can hurt you.

Bike retailers are such a great example of this. A customer walks through those doors looking for “a bike”. That’s often all they know. And learning about what bike to buy and why can be intimidating.

Explaining any technical product to a customer needs to be done in a way that’s approachable to the customer. Bike shop sales floors are filled with guys who know a ton about bikes, but not enough about the right way to convey that information to the customer. You can just see customers stiffen and shut down when a sales associate starts spouting techno-jargon. It’s almost like they’re trying to show how smart they are. Your customer’s nodding as if he agrees, but really he’s just feeling intimidated or – worse – kind of dumb. He’s looking for any excuse to exit the conversation. And the store.

Employees who explain the product need to learn to ask the right questions first, listen carefully to a customer’s answers and then explain why a product or service meets the customer’s needs. And they need to do this with a bare minimum of techno jargon.

Mike Olson owns the Trek Bicycle Superstore dealerships in San Diego. You’d be hard pressed to find a better place to buy a bike anywhere on the West Coast. Part of the reason for this is that Mike places such a premium on explaining their products in ways that don’t make newbie customers feel self-conscious. I asked him the other day whether he’d rather have a new employee who had a talent for connecting with a customer, or one with unusually deep technical expertise. Mike: “The connector guy. It’s not even a close call.”