Should you involve your customers in determining your strategy. My view - yes you should and we have found a good technique to help you to do it.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a technique for getting customers to help you improve your business.The theory of Net Promoter Score is really easy. Unlike most things where the theory is easy, the practice is also easy.

There's a website for an American company here. NPS seems to be a system with some research behind it but I don't know if there's any IP protection on the technique - can't see how there could be but I don't know.

You ask your customers three questions:

1. How likely on a scale of 0 to 10 are you to recomend [insert your company here] to a friend or colleague (where 10 is very likely and 0 is not at all likely.
2. What's the main reason for giving that score? (keep repeating until they don't have anything else to tell you)
3. What would we need to do to enable you to give a score of 10? (keep repeating until they don't have anything else to tell you)

The way that you calculate your score is shown here.

The following image is reporduced from the above referenced page with acknoledgements.

In our experience you get very high response rates (40% and up) and they customers tell you what's on their mind in a very open and honest way.

This "voice of the customer" input is vital to determining the strategy that you should adopt in my opinion.

One of the main advantages of NPS is that ig gives you a score that can be tracked over time as you work to do the things that your customers tell you.

Silkmoth have used this technique both for ourselves to improve our business (and it has done) and for our customers. We have developed some tools to help our customers carry out these sorts of surveys.

I recommend it to the house.

Google have announced their own social network Buzz. At the moment it looks like you'll need a GMail account to use it but we expect this limitation will be lifted if the new service stands any chance of success.

We'll keep an eye on it to see how it fares against the big boys. For now here's Google's preview...

Is there room for another social network in our lives or has Google arrived too late? Remember they were late to the Search Engine party too!

The National Tyres eBay Store has been up and running for a couple of months now. It was a very challenging project as not only was it a new concept for National and Silkmoth it was also a bit new for eBay!

Here's ten things we've learnt along the way:

1. eBay is changing

   Traditionally eBay is a website for helping people to clear out their loft, sell old baby clothes and generally to do a bit of online car-booting. This is all changing because eBay have realised that while people are happy buying old tat, they're even happier when they buy brand new stuff at bargain prices.

   eBay are now targetting retailers, like National, to come on board and list their inventory. The model of paying a listing fee and then a sale fee (final value fee) is changed for retailers so that listing fees are close to zero. This encourages retailers to list as many items as possible.

   Previously when you searched on eBay you'd see the items ending soonest. 1 minute left to grab a bargain! This has changed now to a cryptic most relevant ordering of search results. What this means is that they'll list the items according to what your most likely to buy. If you're a retailer who sells more iPods than any other you'll be top of the list, regardless of price or when your listing ends.

2. eBay have an API

   For the unitiated an API is an Application Programming Interface. That means there's an interface we can use to automate tasks such as listing items, changing prices and stock availability, leaving feedback etc.

3. The API is a bit slow!

   As flexible as the API is, it's also very slow. eBay have told us that they hope to speed things up and we're hoping that they'll do that soon. It currently takes around 20 seconds to list an item. Listing 6,000, as you can imagine, takes a little while! Fortunately, retailers are allowed to list items as Good Til Cancelled (GTC) which means you don't need to keep relisting things every 7 or ten days.

4. The eBay site is not very flexible

   While the API might be very flexible the website isn't. For instance we would like customers to have to book a tyre fitting before completing the checkout process. Sadly, this isn't a comfortable fit in the eBay model and we've had to build a system that badgers customers to book their fitting until they do so. Fairly trivial stuff but vital to the customer experience.

5. You've got to work hard to get good feedback

   A good feedback score is vital to making a success of your eBay store. As your feedback score increases, so does the eBay user's confidence in you. It takes a little while to get your first sale when your feedback is zero but you'll see sales increase as your feedback score does. eBay absolutely will not artificically inflate your score to get the ball rolling, you need to earn every feedback and you need to make sure every user has a good experience.

6. eBay Shops can look great

   We've seen lots of dodgy looking listings and shops on eBay but the new breed are very different that National store looks great but tyres aren't the most exciting product to look at. Have a look at the Littlewoods store to see just how great an eBay shop can look.

7. People use eBay as a Search Engine

   You might think that most people start searching for a product in Google or one of the other search engines. For many people that's no longer the case. For many they've already decided that eBay's the cheapest place to buy something so they go straight there. They do their price comparisons within eBay and don't look anywhere else.

8. SEO applies to eBay too

   Knowing that many people go straight to eBay to buy something you need to make sure that they find your items when they get there. Many of the techniques for on-site search engine optimisation apply to your eBay item listing. Figure out your keywords and get the important ones in the item title. Get all of your keywords in the item's description.

9. Get your Item Specifics right (if you can!)

   When you list an item on eBay you can set a number of item specific values. A common one is Condition - new or used. For car tyres we had to make sure we set the manufacturer, the width, height, load index and speed ratings among others. By doing this our items are included in those available through eBay's search tools. For instance a tyre customer can refine the results by width. By setting the appropriate item specific attribute we make sure our items are included.

   As the types of product being listed on eBay expands they're struggling to keep up with the list of attributes. For instance, there are no sensible attributes associated to motorcycle tyres (not yet anyway). For now you just have to do the best you can.

10. eBay are incredibly helpful

    eBay have been really helpful. We've been allocated a project manager to liaise with. He made sure we were on-track and he also made sure we got access to the right people and information when we needed it. They created the design for the National store which looks great and they even got their user experience team to have a look at the store once we'd finished it.

If you want to talk to us about building you an eBay store just give us a call.

National Tyres eBay Store Portfolio

Silkmoth have become a Kentico Gold Solution Partner.

Now with over a year's experience of delivering website's using one of the world's leading content management systems (CMS), we've been rewarded by becoming a Kentico Gold Solution Partner.

Petr Palas, Kentico's managing director said, "Congratulations on achieving the Gold Partner Status! I'm happy that you made it since your company certainly deserves this recognition."