Rick Braddock is the Chairman and CEO of FreshDirect. Here are a few excerpts from an essay appearing in the Wall Street Journal,  adapted from a lecture he gave at Pace University on May 8, 2009.

At FreshDirect, our core mission is to change our customers’ lives by giving them a superior on-line shopping experience. Our ’secret sauce’ is our customer database, and the company’s growing ability to use it to enhance our customers’ experience. For as long as people have shopped with FreshDirect (which has been operating more than five years in the New York metro areas and is achieving real growth even today), the company knows the details of each time a customer has shopped on the site, every unit bought during those visits, and all service interactions. The company also knows exactly who its customers are when they enter the online store for a new shopping visit — a loyal customer, a new customer, or a lapsed customer who has been away for awhile and needs to be welcomed back.

When you know your customer so well, you have the opportunity to change your whole managerial approach and really make the customer the king in your plans. This leads to what I call managing with intense customer focus.

At FreshDirect, the core of this intensity starts with daily focus. Each day our senior team starts with a formatted review of our immediate business — yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Each manager uses customer-focused metrics to explain what is going right or wrong versus expectation and what we are doing about it. Shortfalls are addressed and successes are celebrated.

We bring additional customer focus by running about 140 customer surveys a year. We survey weekly, checking key metrics and items of topical importance like the economy or competition, and monthly on deeper topics such as product and service. We also analyze customers’ verbatim survey responses to allow us to truly understand where customers have problems we can solve. For most businesses, this type of information is on the periphery of their operations. For us, it is at the center. With technology advances and proven analytical methods, there is no good reason not to use these techniques to get closer to the customer.

What techniques does your company currently use when marketing online? Would you agree with Mr. Braddock’s theory that the closer you are to a customer, the more success your business will have?

Read his entire article here.