Saturday, August 29, 2015

Pretending to Listen to Customers Rather Than Actually Doing So

Comment on Are You Really Listening to Your Customer or Just Going Through the Motions?

I find myself very frustrated at how incredible poor and superficial "listening to our customers" is at nearly all companies I have to deal with. It is atrocious, often beyond the superficialness of any concern is creating hoops to waste customers time who even deign to raise an issue of persistent failures by the company (I have had this with Amazon for the last 2 months - it is amazing how they expect you to repeatedly jump through hopes while they ignore you over and over). I would have dumped them for this horrible service but I can't get them to refund my sizable balance because it isn't their "policy" to bother to refund money in your balance.

A method to get useful feedback I learned maybe 20 years ago at a quality conference, it is really simple, why nearly no companies do it is a sign how little they actually care about customer service and improvement. Just ask "customers, what one thing could we do to improve?"

Then you also need systems in place to use what you learn to improve, of course.

Related: Delighting Customers - Simple Customer Care: Communicate - Poor Customer Service: Discover Card - What Job Does Your Product Do?