Do you listen to your customers? I’ll answer the question right away. Yes, of course you listen to your customers! No brainer!
As we are moving to a customer-centric world, service organizations have been focusing on gathering more and more customer data or feedback. Why? Because customers’ inputs are valuable – the data/feedback shows what customers want and the management can make actions based on the findings.
That sounds good in theory. But in reality when we ask companies what they have done with the data and feedback collected from customers, the answer we often hear is “not much”. So, if listening to customers does not yield decent returns, why do we still do it?
There is an interesting article shared on the HBR Blog Network titled “Stop Listening to Your Customers,” which challenged the conventional wisdom. Counter-intuitive as it sounds at first glance, the article does shed light on the possible reasons why listening to customers is NOT an ideal approach to improve the customer experience. Specifically, there are two reasons why this may in fact be true:
- Customers do not always know what they need;
- When you ask them what they need, they tend to tell you everything.
If you don’t believe the argument, I’ll give you a perfect example. In our research, we saw that companies were adding more and more channels in response to customer voice so we set out to study customers’ preference about channel choice. Surprisingly, the data came back showing that actually 84% of customers just wanted their issues to be resolved in an easy way no matter which channel they use. But if you ask customers whether they need additional channels, they will say “yes, of course!”
So, if listening to customers is not the ideal approach, how can we learn customers’ needs and preferences to further improve their experience? The answer suggested in the HBR blog article is this: start watching them instead.
It may sound new but progressive companies have already taken this approach and seen great results. One of our members realized that traditional VOC sources generated ideas that sometimes didn’t necessarily reflect customer service needs. Therefore, they actually set out to observe customers in real-life situations and by doing that they successfully identified true customer needs. In another example, Intuit has famously been “following customers home” for years to observe customers using their tax software.
A more scalable way to observe customer behaviors is probably through operational data – where customers typically go first (Online? Ask a friend? Call the company?), where they spend their money the most, where they fail to solve issues by themselves, etc. Through behavioral data, companies may draw a more rational conclusion of customers’ needs than solely analyzing what customers say to you.
Service leaders, do you listen to your customers? Are you overvaluing your customers’ feedback and undervaluing their actual behaviors?
Related CEB Customer Contact Resources:
Ending the Customer Expectation Race
Resist Pressure to Add Customer Choice
