Listen To Your Customer Or Die

The following is an edited excerpt from the book, Listen Or Die, by Sean McDade.

Every time your customer interacts with your company, their experience will ultimately decide how they act in the future.

Think of it as each customer having a bank account full of experiences.

Delivering a great customer experience is like making a deposit for a rainy day — that customer may forgive a mistake or two based on the goodwill you built up over time.

But a bad experience is the opposite.

It’s like a large withdrawal from the bank account, and eventually, if there are enough withdrawals, you won’t retain that customer any longer. And that customer may very well share their disappointing experience with their friends (and even the world via social media).

What’s your experiential account balance with each of your customers? How do you know? Have you asked them?

I get a lot of questions from customer experience (CX) professionals on the best way to create a customer listening program that will deliver real results, especially reduced churn, better social reviews, and increased top-line revenue.

And one of the best ways to accomplish those goals is for your company to become truly customer-centric.

But what does that mean?

What Does Customer-Centric Actually Mean?

When leaders of a company fail to explain or provide specific examples of what it really means to be customer-centric, employees often see these words as little more than corporate platitudes.

I often get feedback from our clients’ employees who say they don’t know what it means to be customer-centric, and they certainly don’t know how to practice it.

But the reality is that becoming truly customer-centric is about more than developing vague marketing statements. The more important question is this: “As an organization, what can we do today to put the customer first?”

And to actually make this real, each employee at a customer-centric organization should ask themselves this question: “What can I do today to create a better customer experience for our customer?”

The reality is that becoming truly customer-centric is more than developing marketing statements — it is a fundamental shift in a company’s mindset to truly focus on the customer.

The best way I know for companies to actually become more customer-centric is to consistently listen to the customer. Period. It starts and ends there.

I believe the choice is simple — either listen to your customers or die.

It sounds a bit dramatic, but it is true. Ask RadioShack, Blockbuster, BlackBerry, Kodak, and any other companies that were once on top and then stopped listening to their customers.

How To Listen To Your Customers By Using VoC

I recommend accomplishing customer centricity by using an organization-wide, customer listening program called Voice of the Customer (VoC).

VoC gathers customer feedback during, or soon after, an experience. Then customer feedback is delivered to the people within the organization who are responsible for improving the experience and immediately resolving any issues identified by the customer. Resolving customer issues immediately increases the likelihood that you will retain customers and reduce churn.

This is a marked departure from when all customer feedback lived in the market research department and was often confined to a handful of people within the organization.

Here’s the key point: when customer feedback reaches those who interact with customers every day (usually called the front line or operators), and they are empowered to act on this feedback and save potentially lost customers, a CX mindset is extended to the entire company. Your company begins to become customer-centric!

VoC also makes it easy for customers to be heard no matter how they choose to interact with your company. I refer to these interactions as touchpoints.

VoC tells you which touchpoints are going well (a hotel’s spa, for example) and which are not (perhaps the hotel’s in-house restaurant or front desk service).

Regular customer listening with VoC enables your company to be more customer-centric by:

• Immediately resolving individual customer problems as soon as possible before you lose that customer and/or they spread negative word of mouth (often through social media). Reducing customer churn and increasing the chances that a customer will provide a positive social review (or reducing the chances they will share a negative one) are two major business benefits of customer listening programs.
• Understanding, at a strategic level, how customers feel about the various touchpoints, so you know where you are strong and where you need improvement.
• Improving the touchpoints that aren’t working, starting with the ones most likely to cost you customers or entice them to share negative feedback on social media.

The Overarching Goal Of Customer Listening

Big changes — systemic changes — impact every customer. While VoC programs are great for figuring out when a particular customer has an issue so that it can be resolved quickly, the overarching goal is to figure out the root cause of the issue so the experience can be improved for all customers in the future.

Your time is best spent focusing on systemic issues that impact the experiences of many customers. Make sure that you have your finger on the pulse of the customer by checking in on individual customer complaints occasionally, but remember that your job is to improve the overall customer experience.

When you start focusing on the big issues that impact the customer experience, you are spending your time wisely. Remember, it’s more important to change the process that is creating the problem than it is for you to follow up on individual customer complaints about that problem!

For example, if delivery takes too long, the retailer should figure out a way to deliver the product quicker rather than promise future discounts over and over again. Apologizing and making amends gives a nice touch and can be an important step, but fixing the core issue solves many more problems down the road. Think of this as scaling yourself for the benefit of the organization and the customer.

To be frank, this is not an easy task and will require you to interact with many different groups within your organization.

If your company has a digital experience problem where customers are abandoning your website before purchasing, work with the website team to troubleshoot.

If the problem is long wait times when customers call the contact center, roll up your sleeves with the head of the contact center to brainstorm how to get calls in quicker.

If you’re working in a hotel group and a particular hotel’s check-inline is consistently too long, work with the hotel general manager to ensure they hire more people for the front desk or figure out a better process to get guests through more quickly.

Even though it can seem daunting, all this work will be well worth your time.

If done right, it will build up trust in your customer’s experiential account balance, and that often translates to real, lasting, and repeated business.

To learn more about how to develop a competitive edge by managing your customer experience, pick up Sean McDade’s book, Listen Or Die.