Accelerating Through Uncertainty: #2 - Talk Less. Listen More.
Uncertainty is Certainly Not Going Away
Uncertainty is everywhere and solutions are hard to find. Even in challenging times, competitive differentiation is built on learning more about your customers and turning it into action faster than the competition. The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) has continued to prove that companies focused on what customers want outperform the rest. Why is this more important during times of uncertainty? Because good listening requires hard work and rigor – and it’s even harder when customers are worried about their business.
Customer feedback can be noisy in the best of times and deafening in the worst. At PATH, we start most of our engagements receiving a list a mile long of the things companies are doing to improve their customer experience. Good ideas aren’t typically the problem - knowing which good idea is going to drive revenue growth is a harder nut to crack.
Turning Down the Internal Volume & Turning Up the Customer Voice
How do you turn down the volume to hear what matters most? As we mentioned before, there is a key defining characteristic of the organizations that outperform the rest, especially in times of uncertainty. The ACSI graph above spells it out in clear terms - the best companies are listening hard to their customers and turning that into action faster than their competition. The first step required is for organizations to take a breath and stop focusing internally about what they think customers care about. The next step is listening.
Organizations aren’t built to be great listeners. Why? Because companies are made up of hundreds of moving parts and changing course is hard in small businesses let alone at scale. But one of the inevitabilities of business is that customers - and their tastes, preferences, needs, wants - will eventually change. How do you decide when the change is worth it? How do you know when it’s going to be the change that drives both the top line and bottom line and ensures your market dominance into the future? By building a system of customer feedback collected and analyzed in a powerful way.
In our 40 years, we have worked with many businesses that have achieved success regardless of outside influences and economic pressures. They achieved that by listening to customers and then applying those insights in disciplined ways across the functions of their business, including building a sales engine and organizing internal operations to best meet customer needs.
It all starts with hearing what customers and the market are saying. Talk less. Listen more.