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The Howards simply wait for the survey results, which arrive by E-mail every afternoon. Customers are asked to fill out two E-mail surveys, the first time when they make their purchase and the second when their item is delivered. Cooperating customers are rewarded with online scratch tickets or other chances to win cash. The Howards have been pleasantly surprised at the number of customers who fill out BizRate's 10-point survey, which covers things like customer support. The response rate has averaged at least 20%, and on some days it's as high as 35%. BizRate adds up the scores Carrot's receives and sends the Howards a "VitalMail" report.

On a typical day recently, the overall score Carrot's got was 9.3, putting it in the top 1% of BizRate merchants. Just as pertinent as the ratings are the comments that come directly from customers. "I like reading the comments. They're more important than the metrics," John Howard says, since the real-time information can help the company correct problems quickly and systematically. Thanks in part to that advantage, Carrot's has raised its revenues to $2 million since its launch.

Getting from users an instant snapshot of how a company is doing is a big breakthrough in customer service, says consultant Patricia Seybold. What companies can measure "in or near real time," she says, differs from the quality of data they can collect if they survey their customers once a year. That doesn't mean that every time customers call or send E-mail, they should get a "little five-point questionnaire," adds Seybold, who recommends that companies start slowly by polling a percentage of their customers each week.

The moving service, RMR, does exactly that. Its real-time feedback from customers is the "most incredible quality-control tool," Bob Carbonell says. "It's live hot data. It gives us an opportunity to resolve issues that are festering."

Real-time feedback from customers is the "most incredible quality-control tool," says company president Bob Carbonell. "It's live hot data."

Each day, RMR's managers receive the results of a two-page satisfaction survey that customers have completed on the Web. The old, paper version of the survey got a 15% response, says Carbonell. Shifting to the Web has boosted the rate more than threefold.

RMR's surveys go out at the conclusion of each move. The transferee receives an E-mail message that is linked to the survey. He or she is asked to type in comments and answer 20 questions. Half pertain to RMR's service, half to the performance of the moving agent selected by RMR. If a mover or a truck driver has a string of low scores, RMR calls right away to correct the problem. Measured on its own 10-point scale, RMR's own customer-satisfaction rating stands at about 90%, according to John Carbonell, the company's sales man- ager and Bob's brother. He says that's a good average, since "you hear more from people with any kind of problem." But, of course, that's exactly who you want to hear from sooner rather than later.

Stratis Morfogen of FultonStreet heartily agrees. "The customer who says, 'You stink!' -- that's the one we want to talk to," he says. Moreover, when Morfogen, also a BizRate subscriber, receives any kind of negative feedback through that channel, he routinely sends an "E­gift certificate" to acknowledge the complaint.

Path Four: Proactive Pursuit
The possibility of finding out what customers think as they are thinking it is a revolutionary development. But nothing is more radical in the realm of customer service than what Bill Strauss is attempting to do. Strauss, CEO of Proflowers.com, an online florist based in San Diego, isn't satisfied with improving customer service to the nth degree. He wants to eliminate the need for it altogether.

Strauss is a former vice-president of customer support and operations at Intuit, the financial-software company known for its efforts to make software so intuitive that "customer support" is superfluous. The five years that Strauss spent at Intuit in San Diego burned a zero-tolerance attitude into his psyche, he says. Now he's trying to translate what he learned there into improving the customer-service performance of Proflowers, which Strauss joined during its start-up in 1998.

Before Strauss had sold a single daisy, he scrutinized the workings of the company's customer service. After they placed an order, customers most often called simply to check on the order's status: Have the flowers been delivered? From the start, he had Proflowers gear up so it could send three automated E-mail messages as an integral part of every transaction. The first message is now standard fare at many Web sites: the minute customers place an order, they receive a confirmation by E-mail. When a delivery truck picks up the order from Proflowers, that information goes back to the company's Web site, which spins out a second E-mail update. But it's the third message that's the charm. The customer gets a message saying that the flowers were delivered, for instance, at 11 a.m., signed for by Casey Jones. The third E-mail all by itself "limits the number of calls we get. It's proactive," says Strauss. "It's one thing to just do a good job handling the calls that come in, but that's just reactive."

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