Is Your Company Really 'Listening'

 to Your Customers?

An organization can only provide its customers with what those customers truly want - value as defined by those customers - if the organization continually, formally & informally listens to its customers.

Dr. Lynn Berry, Professor of Marketing at Texas A&M & author of Competing Through Quality, has developed a functional model for attracting & retaining customers - to 'Close the Gap' between Customers' Expectations & their Perceptions. The four steps within Lynn's model are to:

1.  Understand your customers' expectations
2. Develop standards of performance in line with those customer expectations
3. Perform to those standards of performance
4. Not create any false expectations - which, of course,  raise customers' expectations & widens the gap

You'll note that the 1st step in the model is: knowing what your customers expect of your organization. Many businesses have gone out of business telling themselves how well they were performing - failing to seek & understand their customers' expectations & perceptions. After being in an industry for awhile, it's human nature to assume that we know what is best for our customers.

The most successful companies deliver far more than products & services. They understand & enable their customers to achieve their strategic plans more effectively than their customers could with any other supplier. But we can't have that in-depth knowledge of our customers' needs, business goals & marketplace without asking. If a business does not have processes in place to monitor its relationships with its customers, it's relatively easy to miss the early warning signs that a customer may have become dissatisfied & may be 'shopping' the competition. Relatively few organizations do this well - so effectively 'listening' can provide a significant competitive advantage.

Through a customer survey an organization:

• Can capture their customers' expectations regarding product & service quality, customer experiences & pricing
• Which allows the organization to create positive perceptions leading to customer satisfaction & loyalty, repurchase intentions & willingness to recommend
• Thus enhancing market share, profits & shareholder value

Gaining this competitive advantage begins with at least one ongoing customer listening methodology. Let's take a quick look at the pros & cons associated with six commonly utilized approaches:

1.  Face to face interviews:

Pros: Complex questions can be explored, in-depth responses are obtained & often this is the only means of surveying executives

Cons: Interviews are time consuming, costly & obtain perceptions from a relatively small number of respondents

2.  Focus Groups:

Pros: Stimulate creative thinking & allow the participants to build on the comments of others

Cons: Group setting may be a limiting factor, they do not allow participants to fully express themselves & they can be influenced by dominant participants and/or an ineffective facilitator

3.  Electronic:

Pros: Real time feedback, inexpensive with low marginal costs & world wide coverage

Cons: Does not allow for probing, the response rate can be low & often the responses contain limited specifics

4.  Mystery Shopping:

Pros: Convey the reality of customers' experiences & can be structured to understand what is actually occurring in most types of customer experiences

Cons: Quality of feedback is heavily dependent on the training & skills of the shoppers & this approach requires a significant number of responses to obtain a valid perspective

5.  Surveying Customer Contact Employees - as to what they are hearing from customers:

Pros: A readily available, in-house source of information & creates employee buy-in to subsequent customer satisfaction improvement initiatives

Cons: May be significantly biased & provides only subjective input

6.  Customer Advisory Panel:

Pros: Often the best source of strategic feedback from customer executives & allows the host organization to obtain feedback regarding potential new product or service offerings

Cons: Requires upfront planning & logistical efforts to obtain participation & facilitate the meeting with customer executives

There is no best means of 'listening' to customers. The approach that is most appropriate for an organization depends on the organization's need:

• for a high customer response rate
• for rapid responses
• to acquire complex information/responses
• to offer anonymity to the respondents
• to avoid interviewer bias
• to reach a geographically dispersed customer base
• However, once you understand your customers' expectations & perceptions - you can utilize that information to make your organization 'famous for' the performance attributes most valued by your customers.