Here’s something you don’t hear in boardrooms too often, “What would our customers think?” – “How would our customers react?”
There are a lots of different buzzwords and catchy phrases floating around the boardroom these days. Words like: “big data,” “customer centricity,” and “the voice of the customer.”
How ingrained in your organization’s culture really is the voice of the customer?
Buzzwords and catchy phrases allow us to feel like we’re on the right page and moving in the right direction, but what’s the point if you haven’t developed a process for truly listening and understand the needs and expectations of your customers?
Here’s the thing about the voice of the customer. If your executive teams claims this to be an area of focus, then you must start with actually listening to both current and prospective customers. Your goal is to understand their wants, needs, expectations, opinions, and even the shortcomings of what you do.
You do this by collecting data, and building a system to capture this information can be simple to implement. I’m talking about simple data collection like comment cards, surveys, focus groups etc. Then comes the hard part….
A customer retention focused company doesn’t just use these tools to build it’s database of customers and user information, it actually reads them – and it also responds accordingly.
Are you listening?
