Listen to What Customers Are Saying

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Don’t simply look at customer service needs as an irritation. Look at each contact as a chance to listen to and learn about your customers. Listen to the feedback they give and see whether there aren’t some hidden gems embedded in there. Let customers teach you the best way to grow your business.

Instead of spending money on conducting market research to find out what makes your customers tick, you should instead make it a point to pick up on what your customer service people are already hearing day in and day out. Customers requiring after-sales service are rarely if ever shy about telling your people what they think. All you need to do really is organize yourself to pick up on these clues and do something worthwhile with all this information.

The three keys to making this happen are:

1. Teach your customer service people how to listen and when to do it
2. Find smart ways to listen which are also cheap and effective
3. Turn what you hear into viable action within your organization

1. Teach your customer service people how to listen and when to do it: because if you look around your organization, you’ll probadly find that there are already front line staff who interact with customers hundreds or even thousands of times each workday. Encourage all these people to workout whether the complaints they are hearing or the issues they are resolving are one-off incidents or more indicative of systemic problems. Train people to listen for underlying causes, themes and systemic trends. Encourage them to try and get to the root causes of problems and then to track how often those causes lead to people calling in. It may be helpful to have weekly team meetings where front line staff can share their war stories about what customers are saying at the present time. Another alternative is to establish one central database where all complaints, insights and customer suggestions are collected and then made available for managers to analyze.

2. Find smart ways to listen that are cheap and effective: or put differently, develop a broad range of listening posts and then gear everyone up to take advantage of that information. The possible techniques you can use to listen are very broad:

Set up in-store kiosks and run surveys.

Invite customers to fill out comment cards.

Offer opt-in e-mail surveys.

Have easy-to-use feedback options on your Website.

Conduct post-sale telephone surveys.

Record some actual service calls for analysis.

Analyze the notes that customer service people keep for recurring themes, emerging trends or noteworthy key words or phrases. Correlate this data.

Build automated feedback tools into your company Website, into customer warranty enrollments, into every contact you have with your customers.

Set up company blogs or wikis where customers can leave their feedback, ideas and suggestions for others to agree with or disagree with.

3. Turn what you hear into viable action items within your organization: use all this feedback to drive actions that improve things rather than retaining the status quo. By gathering feedback, you’re raising customer expectations that things will change for the better, so you’d better be using this material to drive some ongoing improvements. The cycle in action here is:

1. Capture the insights embedded in customer feedback
2. Establish root causes and set priorities for improvements
3. Set clear accountability for improvements
4. Execute solutions that provide benefits for customers and your organization

Learning what customers are saying is all well and good, but this information only becomes valuable when it is backed up with action to address the various issues being raised. Obviously, it will take effort and organization to mine the data and establish the themes and issues customers are speaking about. It might be helpful to establish an “improvement council” that meets periodically to review the data, set priorities and establish who will be accountable for making the right things happen.

You would expect the senior management of your organization to need to sign off on the specific recommendations that get made, but until you have a cycle going, it’s unlikely any improvements will get made. Someone has to take responsibility for establishing what needs to happen and then allocating the resources that will be required to make it happen.

Stop coping with customer demand for service, which simply increases customers’ frustration; instead, challenge customer demand for service so that, ideally everything works perfectly, eliminating defects and confusion so there is no need at all for customers, ot even prospective customers, to contact the company for information or for help.

–Bill Price and David Jaffe

Delivering improved service is rarely the responsibility of the customer service area alone. Companies need to work out who is accountable for service and reated issues, have a range of mechanisms to make that accountability stick, and involve all the departments to deliver Best Service.

–Bill Price and David Jaffe

There is no excuse for companies not to listen. No additional investment in customer research is required; companies will obtain huge insight from the contacts they are getting today. They need, first, to be prepared to listen. Then they need to apply the techniques that allow them to tap into all the free or cheap forms of feedback that their customers and staff can provide. Listening is not the end game, however improvements for the customer and company. Many companies are stuck today in a cycle of measurement that doesn’t drive action. Companies that are service leaders use these sources of feedback to drive continuous improvement. They build it into the fabric of how the business runs. What is critical to making this improvement cycle work is not just the listening part but also allocating the resources to discover what it’s telling the company and bow to fix it.

–Bill Price and David Jaffe