LNB #043: Who Are You REALLY Listening To? Customers, Maybe?

"We're committed to excellent customer service."

Interesting idea. However, I'm not sure that we really are. Most of the time, I assert, we're too busy listening to the little voices inside our heads. I mean the voices that are constantly filtering our experiences--judging and assessing, telling us that we agree/don't agree/like it/don't like it/seen it before/trust you/don't trust you and on and on and on. With our little voices giving us the blow by blow from Radio Free Saigon, it gets a little tough to hear much of anything else.

So, are we really listening to our customers, vendors, suppliers, employees and business partners? Probably not.

Setting up listening posts, routine ways to listen to our customers, can be a daunting undertaking. We face loss of management control, changing the fundamentals of the business, reliability of information and scalability. We tend to contact people only when there's a problem we're trying to solve--not to learn about how to improve services that are already great.

Request for Help
If you have a contact at MTV, send me an email. I have a business associate who's trying to make a contact there.

Resources
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
Surveymonkey.com
Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home
Lessons in Listening to Customers (has the overview of the Vodaphone survey)

Listen Now: 25:47