Do you know how your customers feel about you? Really know? Gathering customer feedback about your product or service is critical to the success of your business. But, it's a job that doesn't always get done, and for a myriad of reasons - customers are too busy to respond to your requests, they don't know you want continuous feedback, it's not in their self-interest. This list goes on.

It's tempting to throw a complicated process at the problem with the intentions of eliminating variance and maximizing the return on your efforts. A process can tell you how many followup attempts to make, the best messaging to entice customers to take action, and how best to respond to customers when they tell you what's on their minds. But,a process can't always get beyond the intangible reasons a customer passes on giving feedback, things like being too polite to say negative things, too shy to be candid, or too distracted to focus on the areas that you want feedback on.

Sometimes a clean sheet of paper is the perfect tool to get people thinking in ways that a Customer Feedback Process did not anticipate. And companies like Microsoft are turning to the modern day equivalent of a clean sheet of paper, the wiki, to gather customer input and ideas. Here are a few reasons why a wiki can be the best tool to coax that all-so-important information out of your customers.

Control. Users are in control over how their identity is tracked, if at all. It's standard wiki functionality to track the IP address of all users who change content, for spam control reasons, but other than that, users can choose to proclaim their identity or keep it hidden as an anonymous user. Giving customers control over their own identity options is empowering and will help get more reserved customers involved in the process until such as time as they're ready to reveal themselves.

Flexibility. A survey is a great way of gathering feedback, and should almost always be part of the customer feedback mix. However, the things that make surveys great - simple, controlled, standardized, are also have weaknesses that need to be supported by alternative feedback mechanisms. The flexibility of a wiki allows the feedback process to be treated less as moment in time to capture survey results, and more as an open-ended dialogue that is ongoing with customers. As Naomi Karten, author of several books on business communication, states "open-ended questions frequently provide a level of insight into the customer perspective that is impossible to obtain from closed questions."

On their time. The problem with most survey-based feedback tools is that the requests to take them, and the commitment of time required to complete them are not always convenient to the people who are actually filling them out. Make the survey too long and people won't complete it. Make the survey too short and you decrease the amount of knowledge gained during the exercise And, if you think it's difficult to get a customer to complete an initial customer feedback survey, you can imagine the likelihood of a customer answering followup questions raised due to an initial survey that didn't ask enough questions. A wiki enables customers to jot down their ideas as they come to them. There's no need to invest 15 minutes to complete a series of questions. Instead, the always-on nature of wiki's enable visitors to provide feedback when it suits them, not upon a request from the company.

The open-ended, unstructured feedback that comes from an online dialogue like a wiki site can be a useful complement to a structured set of surveys and forms. Wikis continue to be a popular technology used by companies both large and small to make it easy to create and publish information, which fosters communication with customers, partners, and the public.