Listening to real time conversations for opportunities, leads, and reputation management is now a standard marketing item on the to-do list.

While there are services that provide this kind of tracking for a fee, there are a number of tools that any do-it-yourselfer can employ to capture much of what’s being said about their brands, people, products, and industries in real time.

By guiding the design of customer interactions, the principles of behavioral science offer a simple, low-cost route to improved customer satisfaction.

“Sleep on it” is common advice given to anyone facing a big decision. Yet research by Loran Nordgren shows you may want to stick with your first impression instead.

Have you ever walked into an airport, seen that there is nobody in line at the check-in counter, but still made a bee-line for the self-service kiosk? Better yet, have you ever waited in line for an ATM machine even though there is nobody in line for the teller inside the bank?

If you answered "yes" to either of these questions, you're not alone. Most customers these days demonstrate a huge — and increasing — appetite for self-service, yet most companies run their operations as if customers prefer to interact with them live

Is your enterprise resilient or rigid? In this Q&A, HBS professor Ranjay Gulati, an expert on leadership, strategy, and organizational issues in firms, describes how companies can evolve through four levels to become more customer-centric. Plus: book excerpt from Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business.

Five practical approaches to get closer to your buyers.

When you make decisions that respect and honor customers, you will earn their admiration and, eventually, their love. Then customers will begin to grow your business for you.

Customers who love you won't be able to stop raving about you. But you need to earn the right to their story first.

Rather than giving a one-size-fits-all solution (because there isn't one), my goal is to encourage you to evaluate how you make decisions in five categories.

Usability evaluations are good for many things, but determining a team’s priorities is not one of them. The Molich experiment proves a single usability team can’t discover all or even most major problems on a site. But usability testing does have value as a shock treatment, trust builder, and part of a triangulation process. Test for the right reasons and achieve a positive outcome.

Businesses that thoughtfully examine and measure the time customers spend with them, and then either reduce the time costs or enhance the time value of their offerings, can gain an advantage that will continue when the economy recovers. For companies looking to win over today’s more frugal customers, a focus on the value of time comes not a moment too soon.

These days many customers don't have the money to spend and so the natural tendency is to want to go out and look for new ones who do. It's a great strategy, it's necessary, but it's really only half the story. Here's what you want to know about your customers.

To build closer connections to customers, start by developing analytical prowess.

As customers' needs fragment, marketers must develop common, actionable segmentations and integrate segment-level goals into planning and performance-management processes.

It’s official: the word 'campaign' is becoming more and more scarce as it relates to the new world of marketing. And rightly so. People want to be engaged with a company, organization or cause beyond a short-term gimmick. So we’re starting to see the emergence of the term 'movement,' which makes a lot more sense. Let’s compare the two.

Loyal customers cost less to serve. They concentrate spending with companies they trust. And they help stretch marketing dollars through word-of-mouth referrals. The powerful advantages of customer loyalty help explain why the biggest changes in market share occur during downturns.

Here are the nine ways your audience will respond to your online content.

Few marketers would dispute the statement that it is the sum of all customers' interactions with a company, over time, that ultimately creates or destroys that company’s brand value. Yet few companies take the time to look at their own business practices comprehensively through the lens of their customers to understand how they measure up to their customers' needs and expectations.

Does each customer interaction live up to the brand experience that the company is trying to create? Are you providing a more consistent and relevant customer experience than your competitors are? Which interactions are the most powerful for creating customer loyalty?

Fielding customer-satisfaction surveys is not enough. To better serve their customer base and more effectively acquire new customers, organizations need to delve into the details of individual interactions to understand the relationship between each customer touch point and the value it delivers to customers.

Simple, “one-size-fits-all” customer service strategies, focused mainly on fixing or replacing broken products, may have been sufficient in a time when phones were always landlines, mail was always delivered by a postman, and music was heard through the living-room radio. But in an interconnected world of empowered consumers, technological improvements and tight profit margins, customer service strategies have to be more efficient and more customized to the products and services you are selling.

Even the highest-quality products and most ambitious marketing campaigns can fall short if the customer service experience is poor. In fact, brand success is often tied directly to the quality of service offered to customers.

Organizations often rely on surveys and questionnaires to determine customer satisfaction ratings, but such methods merely offer a perceived customer rating. Obtaining a realistic measure of customer satisfaction involves computing a metric based on a composite customer satisfaction rating system.

In the days of old: circa 2007, social-media marketing meant monitoring the blogosphere and managing forums, but today marketers are jumping in by actively creating and managing brand communities. Dave Balter is the founder and CEO of BzzAgent, a word-of-mouth media network headquartered in Boston. His company recently launched BzzScapes, a network of brand-centric communities, created by advocates and dedicated to the collection and ranking of the most relevant digital content for each brand.

Guy Kawaskai asked him what it takes to create a truly exceptional brand community, and these are his top ten tips.

Why do companies make it so hard to say thank you to the right people?

As brands become increasingly commoditized and competition fiercer, keeping and expanding customer relationships depends on the ability to create loyalty by delivering a customer experience tailored to changing customer needs and values and consistent with the brand promise.

In a time of economic uncertainty—with customer trust eroding and purchase behaviors growing harder to predict—mastering this ability has become even more critical to staying relevant, competitive and profitable.

It's tempting to feel grateful for every customer you have. You should fight that feeling.

In many service industries, customer experience is emerging as a valuable way for companies to differentiate themselves from the competition and to in­crease market share. Most companies understand this, but many are unable to improve interactions with customers enough to make a difference. Why?

The fanfare and promise that boosted CRM's introduction - and raised managers' expectations - have turned to disappointment and doubt. There is, as these authors point out, still hope for reviving and realizing hopes for high returns from CRM. To help them, managers would do well to apply the lessons that these authors write about.

Consumer needs and desires are not entirely mysterious. In fact, marketers of successful brands regularly draw on a rich assortment of insights excavated from research into basic frames or orientations we have toward the world around us, according to HBS professor emeritus Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman, authors of Marketing Metaphoria. Here's a Q&A and book excerpt.