About 70 miles to the north of Salt Lake City is a family-run steakhouse with a great reputation. This steakhouse draws clientele from as far away as Salt Lake City, even though there are many fine steakhouses in the Salt Lake area. A few years ago the owners opened a second steakhouse near my home in a Salt Lake suburb. Their second restaurant, known as Grandpa’s Steakhouse, opened to strong market demand that filled their parking lot. In fact, for the first 6 months parking spilled onto the street, nearly every night.

Eventually, I never saw a car parked on the street, and the parking lot became increasingly empty. Finally, after about 2 years in business, Grandpa’s closed for good.

Failure rates in the restaurant business are high, and most new restaurants go out of business in their first 5 years. But most restaurants take years to develop the customer traffic and trial that Grandpa’s opened with, a leverageable advantage. Grandpa’s should have a filled parking lot today.

So what happened?
At least two things:

	1.	A winning business formula was unsuccessfully replicated.
	2.	Customer expectations were not met.

The answer to both is customer feedback. The owners may be just as wrong about the causes of success at their first restaurant, as they are about the failure of the second. Only the voice of the customer can teach both important lessons.

Perhaps service businesses like Grandpa’s can learn something from aviation.
2003 is the 100th anniversary of powered flight. Since the humblest of beginnings at Kitty Hawk, aviation has matured remarkably. Once a flight plan is filed, how does a pilot stay on course? Pilots encounter storms, turbulence, and contrary winds. At worst, threats can destroy an aircraft. At best, they can blow them off course. But every day thousands of flights arrive all over the world, at the right airport, and largely on-schedule. How do they do it? They listen to air traffic controllers, check their gauges continually, and make a lot of small course adjustments.

Contrast that with business. Comparable gauges are intermittent and rarely consulted. After a business plan is developed, businesses also encounter storms, turbulence, and contrary winds. While these forces are blowing a business off-course, there is no system in-place to facilitate minor course corrections. By the time a correction is indicated, and a clear course of action is evident, it’s often too late. The business has been off-course for months, and disappointed customers have moved on.

So what are the gauges? Market research produces scientific direction, but it may come too late; or the direction implied may become less relevant as time moves on, allowing other forces to work on the direction of the business.

Other gauges include comment cards and mystery shops. These are too manual and sporadic, giving no clear indications of a course correction. They are both known for raising more new questions than they answer.

Today’s market is more competitive than ever. Customers expect a lot, and they move fast. Dissatisfy one customer, and risk the negative recommendation to 10 or more friends. Wait a few months to change directions, and hundreds of customers may have been negatively affected.

The answer is here, and it’s surprisingly cost-effective.
Thanks to CONNECT™, Mindshare’s automated feedback system, you can learn from your customers every day. Because CONNECT is fully automated, it is both affordable and effective. Use CONNECT to improve your business in three ways:

	1.	Incident Management: Solve customers’ problems quickly, and prevent future occurrence.
	2.	Tactical Decision Support: Small and frequent course corrections to arrive at a planned destination.
	3.	Strategic Decision Support: Large and less-frequent course corrections to plan a new destination.

No matter what type of service business you’re in, listen to your customers, stay on-course with continual course corrections, and you will not share the fate of Grandpa’s Steakhouse. By contrast, you will be like the pilot, constantly listening to external and internal gauges, making adjustments in direction and altitude, and arriving at the right place at the right time.