Listen to the Voice of the Customer

The most important lesson I have learned from being in business for 35 years is that your customers will tell you everything you need to know to succeed.

Every day our customers are giving us feedback that can help us improve. We just don't hear it. We don't capture it. We don’t learn from it and therefore we can’t use it to lift our game. Now, this is unfortunate because every year customer expectations are rising and therefore we must all be on a constant journey to find ways to do things better. 

Customers give us feedback by paying us compliments, making complaints, offering suggestions and asking questions.

Compliments are very useful feedback because they not only tell us what we are doing well, they tell us what matters to our customers. After all, we don't compliment people about things that are not important to us. So, compliments tell us what we should keep doing.

If we are lucky, customers will make complaints. I know that sounds strange but complaints really are gifts. First of all they give us a chance to put things right and turn an unhappy customer into a raving fan. But more importantly, complaints tell us where we have problems: systems that don't work, processes not being followed, policies that are not customer friendly.

We should encourage complaints because they tell us where we can improve. Now, I can hear you groan when I say that because nobody likes to deal with an unhappy customer. Perhaps they remind us of an angry parent or perhaps we take their disapproval personally. Or it just might be their aggressive behavior causes us to feel threatened. But if we learned how to handle complaining customers we might feel more comfortable being around them. As a result, we might make it easier for them to tell us what has gone wrong. This would allow us to learn from the mistake and to fix the root cause of the problem. Remember, we do want unhappy customers to tell us about their bad experience otherwise they will go out and tell everybody else.

Suggestions are even better than complaints because customers are not just telling us where we can improve, they have an idea about how we can do something better. But to take advantage of suggestions, we need to put our egos aside and accept the fact that someone who does not work in our company or department could actually have an idea worth listening to.

Even the questions customers ask are worth studying because questions tell us customers have a need that is not being met. Perhaps we hadn't even thought about customers having that need or perhaps we think we are meeting it but in either case questions tell us where we can do something better.

To take advantage of customer feedback, you need a system to capture what your customers are telling you. It could be a very simple system such as a notebook where you write down every compliment, complaint, suggestion or question you receive so that later on you can review the feedback and look for trends and recurring issues. Or it could be a more sophisticated web based system such as Tell Simon, which you can see if you go to tellsimon.co.nz or tellsimon.com.au.

But having a system to capture feedback is not enough. To benefit from what  customers are telling us, we need to have the right attitude. Let me give you an example. Because I am chairman of a small company, two hard fast talking Aussies from Melbourne came to sell me something. I had 2 two-hour meetings with them and presented their offer to my board. We decided not to buy and I sent them an email saying thanks but no thanks.

Since they were hard fast talking Aussies from Melbourne I expected they would put up a fight and sure enough, within 20 minutes I received an email back. This is what it said: “Thank you for telling us your decision. Obviously we are disappointed but we understand your situation. Was there anything about our offer that put you off? Was there anything we said or did that we could have said or done differently?”

And the last time you asked your customers these questions was?  Exactly!

But the email went on to say, “I was raised in a Greek family and taught to respect my elders and to learn from them so I assure you that any feedback you give us will be taken seriously.”

Now, I couldn’t figure out who the elder was but otherwise I thought it was a great email. So I replied saying that, in my opinion, they were very good at talking but not so great at listening. This meant we spent time on things I was not so interested in and not as much time as I would have liked on other things. I said this was not the reason we decided not to buy, but since he had asked for feedback I was telling him this.

I thought he might find this feedback difficult to handle so I expected he would launch a counter attack. Sure enough, in less than a minute, he sent back an email. It said, “Thank you for your honest appraisal, our words will ring in our ears like church bells on a Sunday morning!”

When you get compliments, complaints, suggestions and questions from your paying or internal customers do their words ring in your ears like church bells on a Sunday morning?

They should because your customers will tell you everything you know to succeed!