Are You Listening?

Marketing starts by listening to customers.

Take a look at these questions, then check out the YouTube video posted below.

• Can you quote your latest customer satisfaction numbers? Do you know what percentage of your customers would recommend you to a friend, and what makes that percentage grow or shrink?

• Do you regularly do focus groups with customers to ask them how you could serve them better? To find out which of your competitors they also use, and how you compare in key satisfaction areas?

• Are you regularly spending time in stores talking to customers? Looking in their carts and asking about choices?

• Do you have a web site and/or blog that offers the opportunity for customers to post suggestions  and ideas and criticism without censorship?

• Do you know the top ten questions customers have about your product or service? And do you have an answer for each one that addresses the needs and wants behind the question, not just the basic question itself?

• Do you have regular conversations with your line employees to discuss the questions, complaints and feedback they get from their customers?

• Do you seek out customers you have not heard from in awhile to ask them why?

• Do you make it a regular practice to interview customers of category competitors? To ask them why they buy from the competition? What the competition is doing better than you? Or what the competition is doing that is new?

• Do you know what basic needs your product satisfies? What psychic needs and wants? What descriptors affect those evaluations?

• Do you know how your customers make money? How you help them make (or save) money so that they get to keep more of it?

• Do you know what keeps your best customers awake at night? What new opportunities excite them?

• Do you know what your customers are reading? Watching?

• Do you know what key words customers use when describing your products, or when searching for them on the web?

• Do you know what you are doing that make it more difficult for your customers to spend money with you? What hurdles you could eliminate to make it easier to do MORE business with you?

The Break UP

There are a LOT of marketers who are way too caught up in themselves and their own messages now. You don't need to get fancy, or to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. We're talking basic human interaction. And with all of the opportunities to listen, it seems many organizations are wanting to talk more and listen less.

Are YOU listening?

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Comments

[Paul W. Swansen]

Are "Focus Groups" relevant any more? I'd think, more of the Social Networking tools and direct, on site contact with your customers is a more real approach for real time feedback.

[Frank Martin]

Paul, those tools are useful, absolutely, but as a replacement for focus groups? No way. No more than the development of MRI made X-rays irrelevant. They are different tools, and used to discern different types of information about customers and why they do (or don't do) what they do. There will always be ways that companies can benefit by getting ten customers in a room to talk about their service, their products, why and how they buy them, and how that can be improved. If the groups are well led, what you leave with however, is bigger than that. You leave with an understanding of how your customers and prospects look at you - and look at your competition. How can that help but makes us all better marketers?