As a company, have you ever wondered what you clients are thinking?
As a company, are you even sure that clients *like* your products?
Two very simple questions, simple *if* you actually ask.
For the last few years one could swear that companies don’t ask these questions anymore. How many times have you actually told something to a representative *hoping* that it would actually go somewhere but never see anything come out of it. The scary thing is that you weren’t really expecting anything to happen. Our minds today are so warped from “the spin” that we believe that our opinion has become worthless.
Maybe so, maybe not – but sometimes it really feels like this is where things are going, if not already there.
People need to provide opinions, they need to communicate, they need to say that they love/hate something and they will; maybe just not to you because you won’t let them. No matter how much marketing you apply to the masses, you cannot control them. No matter how many times you tell them that your new product is good for them, you can’t make them buy it.
Then what happens when you start running-out of ideas for new products? Are you actually going to dig into your “failure” bag to try and resuscitate bad ideas that already were shelved? Of course not. So why not ask your customers what it is they like and what kind of products they would like you to produce so that they can then buy them?
I think that companies don’t ask because they don’t want to hear the truth; truth means change.
If I ask my two questions I’m going to get a lot of answers, ranging from “useless” to “priceless”. But if I don’t ask fearing that I have to listen through “the negative and the useless”, then how am I going to find “the essential and the priceless”? If a company is so busy listening to itself that it doesn’t hear what everybody else is saying, then how can it possibly come up with that amazing “something new” that customers really want?
You cannot change things by listening to yourself. In order to change things you have to receive honest and unvarnished input from others; and if that input can be well described, validated, justified and structured, that rigor alone will infinitely accelerate your innovation process; and ignite the passion of the people who care.
And showing you care is a big motivator for engagement. Think that in a world where you often can’t even find a phone number from a company’s website, then what message are we sending out? We are telling our clients: We don’t want your input !!
If we don’t want our client’s input then two things will happen:
- Our clients are going to start thinking that we don’t care
- Our clients will eventually think that our products are worthless and will start looking around for alternatives
Why? The days of “spinning” the customer into believing are fast approaching the day-of-reckoning; customers have seen it all before. They’re not buying it anymore. You could spend millions programming them to perceive that you care, but the act of going through their own experiences (or learning from those of many more via the web) will be much more powerful (perhaps even traumatizing) - that this is the impression that they will *walk away* with.
Are you asking your clients the tough questions? Or are you masking the reality with spin questions? Better yet, are you going beyond the conversation into a meaningful engagement that enables them to create or help dictate what they are willing to spend their money with you on?
Are you actually asking just the happy clients what their experience was like or are you actually also going to ask the unhappy ones what went wrong? If you accept the premise that unbiased feedback is the most valuable (and accurate) form around, then putting people in a room and paying them for their opinion is a waste of time and money.
Telling people what to think is temporary at most. Showing people that you listen will be remembered for a long time; enabling them to participate in a solution will stay with them forever - and they won’t be shy about sharing this good news either. Conversely, showing to someone that you don’t care will never be forgotten - they will tell all of their friends, their family, the people around them…and in today’s Web 2.0 world, they will also tell “the internet”.
Don’t underestimate the power of a single person telling - In 1980, losing a client would mean perhaps losing 2-3 others. Today, with the internet, losing a client could mean losing millions. Can you afford to ignore clients?