You've probably seen and heard, ad nauseam, the commercial with the geeky looking guy holding a phone and saying "Can you hear me now?" Fortunately for him, there was someone listening on the other end. It leads to the question, "Do you listen to your customers?"

To be successful in business today, the answer must be "Yes." In your business you expect things to be handled a specific way. You created the road map for your own success. However, if your customers continually critique the way you do things and question policies or procedures, that road map may lead to a dead end.

By listening to what your customers say you can see your business from a different perspective - the consumer's. You may think your checkout system is perfectly laid out, but if consumers see it as cumbersome and confusing it often leads to cart abandonment.

As Yahoo! Merchant Solutions users, we have an excellent tool at our fingertips to gauge how our clients feel about us - post sale surveys. Those short surveys often give us the wake up call we need to fix or improve things.

At Solid Cactus we're continually asking "What can we do to make things better for you, our client?" Recently, we surveyed over 100 of our clients and used their comments and feedback to improve the way we do things. Was it helpful? Absolutely!

Beginning with this issue of the Solid Cactus Newsletter, I am taking over as Editor and one of my first challenges is to see what you, our clients, want to see each month. We know what we want to bring you - stories to help your backend operations, ways you can cut costs yet still provide great customer service or what to do when it's time to hire that first employee. But is this what you want? Here is your chance to shape the future of our Newsletter.

I invite you to fill out our online survey at: http://www.solidcactus.com/feedback.html

It will only take a few minutes, but your feedback is important. I want to take this Newsletter and make it something that you look forward to receiving each month. I want it to contain useful information that can help you now, or down the road.

Listening to our customers is something that we pride ourselves on and it's an important part of doing business - regardless what industry you are in. After all, when that customer says "Can you hear me now?" you want to be sure that someone is on the other end to say "Not only can I hear you, I'm listening."