Your business is booming! You are making money hand over fist and your bank is sending you love letters. Your investors are crawling over each other to tell give you more money. Everything is going great then, seemingly out of the blue, you are blindsided. A faulty product, a bad employee, an overeager salesman; any one of these is enough to suddenly turn feast into famine. However, chances are you have an Early Warning System in place that could have helped you avert catastrophe: your Customer Service department.

Too often, Customer Service is treated as a necessary business evil. They are a department that costs money and resources but doesn't actually generate revenue for your business. Most Customer Service departments exist solely to deal with customer complaints, returns or questions. However, with some simple tools you can turn your Customer Service department into your corporate Early Warning system that will keep you abreast of potential problems looming on the horizon.

Remember, the employees that answer the phone and speak directly with your customers are the ones with their fingers on the pulse of your products. Most any member of that department can tell you which product or service you offer generates the most complaints. A simple database custom designed for your Customer Service department can help them track every single phone call or email. A good database will track the type of call, the product or service they are calling about, the specific complaint and the solution recommended by the Customer Support representative. You many need to include other metrics that are specific to your business, but just with that simple base you can begin to generate useful feedback from your clients.

Once the database is in place and operating, within a few days (depending on your Customer Service department's volume) you should be able to get a snapshot of negative opinion regarding your products or services. Which products are customers unhappy with? What services are not meeting customer expectations? All of this information can be gleaned directly from this database, with enough time for you to correct the problems before they become impossible to handle. With sufficient information ahead of time, you can take the needed steps to implement the changes that will stop the problem in its tracks.

Customer Service does not need to be a business loss. In fact, they can serve a vital business purpose by gathering intelligence directly from your most vocal customers. This information can then be used to add value to your business by helping you to fine tune products or services to make them more attractive to your customer base.