’s are supervisors and managers.Two ears, one mouth—do the math.
—author unknown
Listening well is a rarity in our society. That helps explain the popularity of psychologists, the scale of the divorce rate, and why there are so many self-help books with communications as their central theme. As a manager, you have to serve as both listening post and traffic analyst. Neither is as simple as it sounds.
Part of the challenge of listening is filtering out the noise of bias and defensiveness. When your frontline workers hear customers suggesting ways your business could do more for them, the instinctive response is to determine how much additional work that might mean. When service employees hear negative comments from customers about their or the organization’s service performance, they have a natural tendency to defend and protect.
Their inherent sense of “possessiveness” about the delivery processes and their tendency to take complaints as a personal attack make it harder for people at the front line to listen in a nonjudgmental way. Although your people are up close and personal with customers on a day-to-day basis, as a manager you are in a better position to listen effectively. Being one step removed from the action, you should have less defensiveness and a broader perspective than the immediate moment.
Additionally, frontline workers typically listen to customers for cues on what to do in what order, instructions for tasks to be completed, or requests for problems to be solved. The “immediate action required” nature of this exchange makes it difficult to spot themes and trends at the front line. As a manager, you’re more likely to have a forest-wide perspective than a tree-by-tree view.
Listening does not mean simply looking at someone while they talk—or adding the obligatory “uh-huhs” in the right spots during phone conversations—and then doing something in response. There’s an important middle piece to the puzzle: Listening means actively seeking to understand another person. That’s why we say it’s a contact sport. Listening without contact, listening without a dramatic connection, is like looking without seeing. Given the uniqueness of really being heard, customers long remember those frontline workers who listen well.
Active listening is responding in a way that says, “I understand what you are saying”; dramatic listening is responding in a way that communicates, “I understand what you are saying and I value what you are trying to communicate.” Whether focused on questions, complaints, or collecting new ideas, dramatic listening leaves customers with the rare feeling of being heard and confident that your organization will honor the information received and will take action where warranted.
Many organizations like to boast of their commitment to great customer listening, pointing to stacks of survey research to prove how serious they are about capturing the voice of the customer. Yet the reality is that today’s customers—and the employees who serve them—too often feel oversurveyed and undervalued. They sense that companies are going through the motions in seeking their input, simply checking off the box marked “touched base with customers,” then returning to business as usual and giving little consideration to their input. Many of these listening strategies seek facts but not feelings, conversation instead of candor. But only by having the courage to ask for unvarnished opinions from customers—and then listening without donning defensive armor—can you hope to get the kind of honest feedback that leads to meaningful service improvements.
It’s also important to listen to the things your frontline people can tell you about constantly changing customer needs, expectations, issues, and concerns. In settings from Walt Disney World to the call centers of USAA Insurance, customer contact people debrief each other periodically to spot new problems or requests, emerging opportunities, and the influence of larger market conditions. When managers act on their information, the message comes through loud and clear: Pay attention to your customers. We’re interested in what they’re telling you. That’s how we learn to serve them better.
There are lots of ways to listen to your customers, and to do it well, you need to master and use more than one style. It’s like using a belt and suspenders to hold up your pants. The redundant systems reinforce each other, but they do so in different styles with different strengths and weaknesses. Consider the following.
1. Face-to-Face. More and more managers are uncomfortable with the idea that the information they are getting is indirect. They want to know things directly and personally, to see and hear for themselves what customers are experiencing on the front lines. Such firsthand knowledge can provide the kind of insights—and make the kind of impact—that reading static customer evaluation reports never can.
One health care executive we know of makes a point of spending one day a week on the front lines of his hospital, often wearing a volunteer’s anonymous coat to reduce the odds that people will slant what they’re saying because they know who’s listening. Interestingly, he says the customer he’s listening to isn’t just the patient. He listens to his people, too. His reasoning is simple: His personal customer isn’t the patient; it’s his people, because those people treat the patients, he doesn’t.
Maxine Clark, founder and CEO of Build-a-Bear Workshop, the unique business that allows children to build their own stuffed animals, visits two to three of the franchises per week, chatting up customers and touching base with employees. Clark says a key to her success as a leader is “never forgetting what it’s like to be a customer” of the store.11
Front liners and managers can learn a lot about the customer experience simply by being more observant. One hotel chain instituted a “follow me” program that had front desk clerks ask repeat guests if they would, for a discounted rate, allow the bell man to unobtrusively hang around and “watch you unpack and settle in.”
The program proved a major source of learning about the small, irritating “workarounds” that hotel customers faced, such as having to place the suitcase of a traveling companion on the floor because the hotel only provided one luggage rack, having to unplug and find a place for hotel-provided hair dryers when guests bring their own, and much more. By “listening with their eyes,” hotel employees found ways to enhance the customer experience that guests may never have suggested on comment cards.
2. Layered Group Listening. How many times have you had a frontline employee tell you, “I wish you could have heard this complaint? We’ve been getting it a lot, and I think it’s something we really need to fix.” Layered group listening is a variation on the focus group technique that enables layers of the organization to listen to customers at the same time. In Figure 4-1, the X’s represent customers, the O’s are frontline employees, and the ’s are supervisors and managers.
Figure 4-1. Layered Group Listening.
The listening process can be done in three rounds, each lasting forty-five to sixty minutes. In round one, the customers are interviewed by a focus group leader 
. Front liners (O’s) can only ask questions for clarification—they cannot explain or defend—and managers (’s) cannot say anything—they only get to listen. After the first round, customers leave, the O’s move to the center table, and ’s move to where O’s had been, and the second round occurs—front liners react to what they heard from customers, and managers only ask questions for clarification.
In round three, front liners and managers spend a round problem-solving based on what they learned together. Some organizations also find it valuable to bring customers back to participate in this third round.
The upshot is managers get a firsthand understanding of the frustrations, concerns, and plaudits that frontline employees hear customers voice every day. Sometimes it takes such exposure—hearing straight from the horse’s mouth—for managers to truly grasp how service problems are affecting customers’ willingness to keep doing business with a company. On the flip side, it’s also heartening to hear kudos about the positive things your staff has done to win customers’ loyalty or make them sing your firm’s praises to others.
3. Comment and Complaint Analysis. Some customers will tell you what’s on their mind face to face. Some won’t risk the chance of confrontation or embarrassment, but will fill out simple “Tell Us, Rate Us, Help Us” comment cards. Tracking them can give you a continuing barometric reading on how you’re doing. More extensive contacts, such as complaint and compliment letters, can be mined for detailed insights into past experiences and future preferences. Keep in mind these work best when customers perceive their comments make a difference.
4. Multichannel Response Systems. Make it easy to listen by making it easy for customers to contact you through toll-free numbers, e-mail, Web-based text chat, Facebook, Twitter, and more. Most service-focused companies today have Web-enabled call centers that route, queue, and prioritize incoming e-mail from customers, enabling customer service reps to handle e-mail and real-time Web requests as efficiently as calls to toll-free numbers.
Don’t make trying to find a toll-free number on your website like a game of “Where’s Waldo?” Plenty of customers have a good reason for wanting to contact you via phone or Web chat versus sending e-mail or visiting your frequently asked questions (FAQ) page; either they can’t find answers to their questions using those resources, or they need more detailed and nuanced responses than those avenues provide. List your toll-free number boldly on every Web page.
5. Monitor the Online Buzz. More companies are listening to their customers by monitoring online discussion boards, tweets, chat rooms, and blogs to stay on top of what’s being said about their products or services. While they know they can’t control online word of mouth, and many of the rants may be unfounded, they nonetheless see it as a valuable market research tool. If companies come across a critical mass of complaints about some aspect of their performance, it may be a sign they need to follow up. Monitoring online commentary also can be a useful way of picking up new ideas for improving service, since offering such suggestions is one of the favorite pastimes of bloggers and users of online discussions boards. Remember, online communications should be a learning conversation, not a sales arena. And, with the growing popularity of Twitter, responding to tweets has become an essential part of communications. Often, customer complaints can be resolved on the spot, and delight occurs almost instantaneously.
6. Customer Advisory Panels. Your best customers, the ones who have been with you for years, represent not only a valued relationship but also a source of savvy insight into your service operations. Use them like a board of directors for the front line. Your worst customers can also be an asset when you find active ways to listen. Emerald People’s Utility District (EPUD), a small public power co-op based in Eugene, Oregon, gets customers involved in various committees and study groups. Arizona Public Service (APS), a much larger regional utility and subsidiary of Pinnacle West based in Phoenix, has recruited some of the public interest advocates who once dogged its every step to bring their interest and energy inside the walls, where they can be applied in useful ways. Retailers have been known to use panels of customers to help them anticipate fashion trends, and electronics companies often tap knowledgeable customers for feedback on design, standards, and pricing of their products.
Last, but certainly not least, there’s the spectrum of more formal techniques for data collection. Mail-in, Web-based, and live surveys; focus groups; telemarketing contacts; mystery shopping services; demographic analysis; and random sampling of target audiences all help shade in the various colors of the big picture.
1. Customer Surveys. Face-to-face, via e-mail or snail mail, on websites, or over the telephone (or through a combination), ask customers to rate you on overall “delight” on the success of the last transaction they had with you, on specific aspects of your service delivery processes, and perhaps most important, on how likely they’d be to recommend you to colleagues or friends as well as whether they have recommended you. The latter two questions measure how well you’ve done at creating “passionate advocates” of your company. Then feed the results back into your organization. Be sure to make questions sound more like they are coming from a neighbor than a doctoral student!
Pay close attention to what your most loyal customers tell you is important. This helps determine what drives loyalty. For example, if you ask customers of an airline the most important feature as a passenger, safety will always top the list. But, if you examine what feature causes customers to pick one airline over another, safety will not likely be in the top five. It is important to know what is important to customers; it is also important to know what drives their loyalty. Be sure to ask both importance and performance questions. Measuring the two dimensions helps you avoid spending dollars on fixing things—or adding amenities—that have little impact on customer loyalty.
2. Focus Groups. Bringing current customers together to discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of what you do puts flesh on the bones of survey data. Customers can problemsolve with you, rate and rank the relative importance of different aspects of your service (the moments of truth that define the shape and style of your services in customers’ eyes), and explain how different elements of a transaction affect their perceptions of you. Employee focus groups work as well as customer focus groups. Bring a group of employees together and ask such questions as “What are our customers saying to you?” and “What gets in your way of delivering good service?” and “What can we do to help keep you fresh and renewed so you can better handle the challenge of dealing with customers all day?” Remember that focus groups can be virtual online, not just face to face.
3. Employee Visit Teams. Send teams of frontline workers, supervisors, and support people out to look at the customers’ “points of contact” (with you as well as your competitors) from the customers’ point of view. Their assignment is to bring back ideas for improving transactional quality based on customer experiences. What are the pluses and minuses of your service delivery processes viewed through the customer’s eyes?
4. Mystery Shopping Services. Some companies specialize in playing the role of customer and giving feedback on your customer contact performance. The best ones work with you to develop checklists or evaluation scales based on your service vision statement; some will even put their people through your service training so they know exactly how your people are supposed to be doing things. As a twist, you can use your own employees as shoppers as well. It is also possible to do comparison shopping of your competition using your own criteria for good service.
5. Toll-Free Hotlines and “Voice of the Customer” (VOC) Websites. A good service recovery system almost always has a hotline or VOC website of some sort, with service employees trained and focused on resolving customer problems on first contact. Many customer-centric companies create toll-free lines or Web chats for specific product or service offerings, and others have gone multilingual. FedEx, for example, has an interactive voice response system that allows customers to speak to either English or Spanish customer service personnel. Customers who call in to register a complaint, make a suggestion, ask a question, or have a problem solved offer extremely valuable input on your service delivery system.
The key to making toll-free numbers and VOC websites work is data capture and analysis. It is more difficult than it sounds to get people in Department A to work with people in Department B on service process improvement. This is especially true when one of the departments is seen as the “complaint handling specialists.” Incentives are usually needed. And objectives. And attention to detail.
6. Benchmarking. Started as a way to compare operational efficiencies with companies that have similar problems or challenges but aren’t in your business (so data can be shared without concern for competitive consequences), benchmarking has become more broadly defined today as a way of looking for breakthrough ideas by seeing how others are seeing their customers. The original purpose of benchmarking related directly to improving service delivery processes by comparing operational ideas and numbers with a world-class company in another industry. That is still the best use possible, but don’t overlook the teaching examples provided by any organization’s comparative experiences.
Listening is useless unless it creates actions which realign efforts based on what is learned.
—Fred Smith
Founder and Chairman, FedEx
