Listening to Who Really Leads

As companies move from focusing on quick sales to deeper customer relationships, there's a specific area that needs to be addressed.

The mother lode of information on how to improve your product offering in order to sell more stuff - firsthand customer feedback. Not a two-way mirrored room of paid focus group attendees. 

Your living, breathing customers and prospects.The voice(s) of your customer. 

There's been a mad rush to social media platforms, to find out what customers are saying about your company - the good, bad, and ugly. Monitoring online conversations is not that hard. Many services can automate that for you. 

The heavy lifting is when you look inside your company and examine any and all obstacles to the flow of customer information. If customer information drives business decisions (and shouldn't it?), anything that gets in the way of accessing this information should be eliminated. Get rid of any blockage to the flow of real-time customer insights. 

Let your customers be heard offline, and they'll have less to gripe about online. Quite often the online moaning is about a crummy, real-world experience.

Yes, it's much harder to improve your company's over-all customer service than to set up a Twitter monitor or Facebook page. But very much worth it. And it's proactive. By the time someone's tweeting about your company it's often a gripe, so you end up primarily doing damage control.

What if the complaint/concern was solved offline, in a timely, polite, personal way? What if anyone who comes in contact with your customers - billing department, receptionist, truck drivers - passed along the information they gleaned to your 'customer care' department? And the idea of having a 'Customer Care Officer' at companies worldwide is starting to catch on. There were 30 in 2003. Today there are over 300.

There needs to be an awareness that anyone who has any form of contact with a customer is in sales. And good salespeople are good listeners. Customers are talking now more than ever, and want to interact deeply with companies. Is everyone at your company listening closely and passing on what they hear? Gathering the unvarnished comments that can help you shape what/how you sell?

A new advertising truism in 2010 is that 'content is king', and who better to influence what content is written and then sent out to the many different media channels? Tailor content to match what the people buying your stuff are most interested in learning about.

What if customers told you what they wanted, and you respond accordingly? Your marketing will be more relevant, your company reputation will improve, your long-term customer relationships will increase. Nice benefits to listening and responding.

photo: mark emery  CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Comments

[Gene Brady]

That's great, Greg. "...keep from turning Twitter into Bitter"!

[Greg]

Great Post as usual. You're right, by the time people tweet about a company, it is usually to whine about a bad customer experience. But by listening to customers offline and responding to their needs, you can keep from turning Twitter into Bitter.