top 10 tips for customer listening

1.    Whatever your business, your customers are voicing their opinions, find out where and harvest it from each and every place, use this to augment surveys and focus groups

2.    Make sure it’s obvious and easy for them to leave feedback in their own words, especially in each place that they deal with you (customer touchpoint), encourage them with hard and soft incentives

3.    Social Media is big and growing, get on the bandwagon (not just communities and blogs), participate and actively listen – you will need technology to maintain coverage and to monitor this dynamic environment focusing your attention on where the conversation is most relevant

4.    Capture both structured and unstructured feedback then organize it into categories that are meaningful to your business – how you want customers to perceive and ones that you can take action on

5.    The action starts as soon as you take the feedback – immediate acknowledgement, timely and intelligent responses and then deliver the insights to the right people inside your organization who can act upon them, then ensure those actions are taken

6.    Make sure the cycle time to capture, categorize, analyze and  act matches the purchase cycle for your product –  in many cases this is real time, so accuracy and precision are also key – if your feedback volume is large, then this will have to be automated – text analytics is the obvious technology

7.    The departments who take their cues from the feedback need to have a quantifiable structure to evaluate the feedback and give them the mandate to act – use BI tools to deliver those insights

8.    There are strategic actions, tactical actions and just plain listening that will improve your customer perceptions and experiences – some of these actions can be automated with the right technology in place

9.    If you are participating in Social Media, then do so genuinely and add tangible value, anything else will be noticed and punished – identify, listen to and use the influencers to carry your messages

10.    Your customer listening program can be a useful barometer as to the performance of your organization, it will allow you to quickly spot underperforming business processes and areas of market opportunity – investment in the program, the technology and your organization’s commitment can yield a positive ROI.