As a business, it’s important that you’re listening to your customers and not just assuming that you already know everything about them. The reality is that you won’t know them all, or what they’re looking for from your business, especially as your business develops and the world continues to move forward and change.
Many founders believe that they’re listening to their customers, but they’re actually just collecting data.
Businesses will miss the signals that come from unhappy customers who leave without ever voicing a complaint. Let’s take a look at what most founders miss when it comes to their customers and how to actually listen to them for the benefit of customer happiness and satisfaction.
What are most founders missing when it comes to their customers?
When it comes to traditional feedback methods like surveys, for example, there will often be single-digit completion rates.
This is often a clear indicator that most customers are simply not bothered or incentivized enough to leave feedback, whether it’s good or bad. Most dissatisfied customers will simply turn their backs on the company, rather than fill out a form. This makes it harder for the founders of a company to find the real reasons as to why they failed those customers.
Founders often make the mistake of polite encouragement for market validation. True signal is often found in desperate users who urgently need a solution to their problems. What’s ‘nice’ and ‘necessary’ is important to distinguish to show customers what they’re really missing in their lives.
Sometimes, there’s an over-reliance on quantitative data. Dashboards tell you what is happening, but only direct conversations reveal the why. When founders are relying solely on metrics, it often leads to building in the dark. Instead, it requires a mix of metrics, but also speaking to customers directly to see where their pain points lie.
There’s also building your business for everyone, aka The Frankenstein Product. Listening to every bit of feedback without any filter can ultimately lead to feature bloat. Successful founders make use of discernment in order to separate those minor requests from critical failures, which leads to customers turning their backs on a company.
Red flags that your business isn’t listening
It’s good to be aware of the red flags that your business isn’t listening to, and by knowing those signs, you’ll hopefully be able to rectify those changes for the better.
High churn with good feedback
If customers are leaving, despite positive survey scores, you are most likely missing silent behavioral signals that need addressing. It may be something so minimal is causing a lot of customers to walk the other way.
Defensiveness
If you’re treating negative reviews or feedback as obstacles to overcome, rather than insights that you should investigate, then you’re only going to be compromising your efforts going forward.
It’s important to be aware of how you speak to customers who leave less-than-savory feedback. There’s a reason most will be leaving it, and it isn’t because they have a vendetta against your business.
Radio silence
Where a client has asked you for an update, then it’s a good indicator that you’ve not been as responsive as they’d like you to be. Every client and customer is different, so you want to set individual expectations when it comes to response times. Some will want more timely responses than others, so don’t assume it’s one-size-fits-all.
Static product
If there’s nothing in your product or internal processes that hasn’t changed in months, then it’s likely that you have stopped adapting to the evolving needs of your customers, and that’s something that will need to be addressed to remain relevant and needed by your customers and clients.
How to truly listen as a business
It’s important that, as a business, you’re listening to your customers properly and not simply relying on the data and any guesswork you may be making.
With that being said, here are a few ways that you can truly listen as a business this year and hopefully keep the customers you’ve gained and retained so far.
- Own the conversations
First and foremost, it’s important to own the conversations you’re having with your customers or clients. This is particularly the case in the early stages. Founders should be personally handling sales and support calls in order to hear the raw and unedited feedback that they’re getting from their customers.
Only by doing this will the hierarchy of the business understand where the real problems lie and that they do, in fact, exist if you’re seeing more people leave after their first experiences with the business.
- Make use of technology
Technology is definitely something to implement and to use alongside all of the other efforts you make when it comes to improving your customer service and satisfaction levels.
From CRMs to chatbots and AI, there’s a lot of great technology out there that is proving highly useful for companies to utilize, but to do so in a strategic manner.
- Watch behavior and not just words
Behavior is something to be attentive too and these are the ‘silent signals’ that you might have otherwise missed. Look at what they’re doing when interacting with your products or services. Are there points where users drop off? Which features are they ignoring?
This is all helpful usage data that can point to where mistakes are being made and where improvements can be achieved. Gathering all of this together on a Composable CDP can then be enormously useful. Essentially, it allows you to make better overall decisions.
- Ask openly for feedback and critical feedback specifically
When it comes to your business, actually listening, you’ll want to think about openly asking for feedback and critical feedback specifically.
Asking questions to customers about the services and products you offer and which ones could be improved upon or even removed from your range is ruthless but necessary.
Feedback should be something that is actively welcomed and proactively chased after with every individual customer and client. Through feedback forms, follow-up emails, and even phone calls, it’s vital to have feedback for those who are both satisfied and unsatisfied with the services or products you provide.
Ask customers to rank their problems by importance to see if the issue you’re solving is actually a priority or whether it’s a small snag that doesn’t matter so much.
- Implement acting listening
Focus on 80% active listening and 20% talking when you’re interacting with customers. This will help you garner more information on the needs of your customers without interrupting them.
When you’re actually listening as a business, you’re likely to keep the customers you have for longer and see fewer dropouts as a result.