Any size and type of business can benefit from customer research. The goal is to find out how people feel about your product and what you can do to improve it so that you wind up making more money selling it. What's the best way to solicit customer feedback? BlackEnterprise.com reached out to the members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world's most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses. Here are their best bets for getting soliciting qualitative information. 1. Software like oDesk and Mechanical Turk I like using sites and softwares where there isn't any bias on the product or service. Pay people to go and check out your software and then give an honest review. UserReviews is also a nice software that I've used in the past to get solid customer feedback. - Peter Daisyme, Hostt 2. Bottom Up and Top Down To effectively assess true customer feedback you need to approach the problem from both directions. First the executives should be having one-on-one conversations with clients to get individual user cases, emotions and stories. Then, you should use a survey or company to conduct numbers-based feedback to ensure your sample set wasn't an outlier. - Brennan White, Cortex 3. Email With a Reward We have the best luck using email to reach our clients, promising something in return for their feedback. The trick is asking a question such as "If we provided service X, would you pay Y if we can guaranteed you Z? If not, why?" These variables are set up by us prior to setting an "established value" if we do launch. And rather than receiving just a yes-or-no response, we want specifics. - Kenny Nguyen, Big Fish Presentations 4. User Testing We used to give away Amazon gift cards to have people come into our office and test our software while we took notes. This was always a wonderful experience, but it certainly had time constraints. For a similar cost, we now use UserTesting (or a variety of similar services), and have gotten as much or more value from the video feedback versus in-person. - James Simpson, GoldFire Studios 5. The Good Old-Fashion Telephone Surveys and focus groups offer valuable information, but nothing is better than an intimate one-on-one conversation with a customer. This encourages unadulterated feedback and helps them feel special, valued and appreciated. The best results come when someone of significance contacts the customer (in other words, no outsourced call centers). Use the 80/20 rule and contact your top 20 percent best customers. - Charles Gaudet, Predictable Profits 6. A Chat Functionality on Your Website There's no better feedback than feedback from someone who is in the midst of shopping. Adding a chat functionality will allow two things: first, people with a question will message you, which enables you to start a broader conversation; and second, some chat products actually allow you to "interrupt" someone's experience. Asking, "Is there anything we can do to help" will get folks to open up! - Aaron Schwartz, Modify Watches 7. Focus Groups When customers are sitting together and talking about features and their experience with your product, you have their full attention and they usually come up with great ideas. The key is to ask open-ended questions and have them discuss the problems they face with your product and in their general day-to-day work to help you identify where to focus your energy. - Randy Rayess, VenturePact 8. A Personal Conversation Give your customers the chance to express themselves directly in person. While this method isn't really scalable, it's the only way to truly understand the customer's pain point and how it needs to be addressed. Don't sell to the customer or be defensive; just listen and ask questions. It's your job in soliciting feedback to be a question-asking sherpa who helps the customer express him/herself. - Brewster Stanislaw, Inside Social 9. An Ongoing Conversation Make feedback an integrated part of regular conversations with clients, and show them that their comments are taken seriously and have a real impact on improving the product. By giving customers a vested interest in providing feedback, it will be easier to keep those channels open when you are actively seeking evaluation down the road. - Zach Robbins, Leadnomics