Are You Listening to Your Customers, or Just Hearing What You Expect to Hear?

I was talking with a client recently about my Listening Post Strategy for capturing the Voice of the Customer.  The idea is fairly simple: Every employee (not just the CX team!) can be a listening post. When interacting with customers, they keep their eyes and ears open for comments, observations, frustrations, ideas, and even those casual remarks that might otherwise slip through the cracks.  As we were talking, another thought occurred to me:

It’s not enough to listen. Your listening needs to be calibrated to the customer.

Think about a piece of equipment that needs to be calibrated. Over time, it can drift. It may still be measuring something, but is it measuring it accurately?  The same thing can happen to organizations.  Over time, we become immersed in our own products, processes, policies, acronyms, metrics, and assumptions. We know how things are supposed to work. Customer satisfaction scores give us one perspective, while our internal dashboards tell us another. And all of that creates a filter through which we hear the customer.

What Did the Customer Really Mean?

Imagine a customer says, “It takes forever to get this done.”

• The customer support team may hear: We need to respond faster.
• Operations may hear: We need to reduce cycle time.
• IT may hear: We should automate this.
• Sales may hear: We need to manage customer expectations.
• And an executive may look at the dashboard and say: Wait a minute. We’re meeting our service-level target!

Everybody heard the customer, but did anybody really listen?

What if you asked the customer to tell you more and discovered the actual frustration wasn’t how long the process took at all?  It was the uncertainty.  The customer didn’t know where things stood, what was happening next, or when they would hear from you again.

A ha!  You don’t have a speed problem; you have a visibility problem.

That’s what I mean by customer calibrated listening.  It is the organizational discipline of listening to customers through their frame of reference rather than interpreting what they say primarily through your company’s products, processes, assumptions, metrics, and vocabulary.

Four Steps to Customer Calibrated Listening

So how do you calibrate your organization’s listening?  I suggest four simple steps:

1. Hear It.  Capture what the customer actually said.  Resist the temptation to immediately translate the comment into your company’s language or jump to a solution.  “It takes forever to get this done.”  That’s what the customer said. Specifically.  Start there.
2. Clarify It.  In this stage, it helps to get curious, versus move on to the next customer.  Follow up by asking:
   • • “Tell me more.”
     • “What makes that frustrating?”
     • “What were you trying to accomplish?”
     • “Why is that important to you?”
     • “Help me understand.”

   You are not defending, explaining, or fixing anything. You are trying to understand the experience from the customer’s point of view.

3. Calibrate It.   Now check your interpretation.  “So what I’m hearing is that the biggest issue isn’t necessarily how long the process takes. It’s not knowing where things stand. Is that right?”  That’s calibration.  Rather than assuming you understand the customer, you’re checking to make sure what you heard is what they meant.  Sometimes you’ll get it right, and sometimes the customer will say, “No, that’s not quite it…”
   Wonderful!  Keep listening!
4. Connect It.  One customer’s comment may be interesting.  The same comment from five customers may be a trend.  That same comment from twenty customers may be a flashing red light.  That’s where customer-calibrated listening connects to your Listening Post Strategy:Capture the insight. Share it. Look for patterns. Discuss what those patterns might be telling you. Determine whether action is warranted.  And don’t limit your listening posts to your customer support team. Customers talk to salespeople, technicians, installers, delivery drivers, receptionists, billing personnel, leaders, and countless others throughout your organization. A seemingly casual remark to any one of them could contain an important insight.

More Data Isn’t Necessarily Better Listening

Most organizations today aren’t suffering from a lack of customer data.  We have surveys, NPS scores, CRM systems, online reviews, customer service tickets, focus groups, dashboards, analytics, and more.

All of that information can be tremendously useful, yet collecting more customer data doesn’t automatically make an organization more customer-centric.

Your dashboards may tell you what is happening.  Customer-calibrated listening can help you understand why it matters to the customer.  And that requires more than technology.

• It requires curiosity.
• It requires employees who know how to listen.
• It requires leaders who are willing to hear something that doesn’t fit neatly into the organization’s existing assumptions.
• Most importantly, it requires us to periodically ask, “Are we listening to our customers, or are we simply hearing what we expect to hear?”

Maybe it’s time to recalibrate.

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