Obtaining genuine, unbiased feedback from customers is challenging. Even more difficult is communicating that feedback to your organization in a relevant and actionable manner.
I Know What My Customers Want
Obtaining genuine, unbiased feedback from customers is challenging. Even more difficult is communicating that feedback to your organization in a relevant and actionable manner.
I’ve had numerous conversations where I’ve heard, “I know what my customers want; I talk to them all the time” or “Our sellers and customer success reps interact with our customers daily.” Yet, these same companies are often blindsided when a key customer suddenly churns or defects to a competitor. The advice to “just listen to your customers” is well-intentioned but unhelpful. It’s akin to telling an awkward friend to “just be cool.” You need to know how to do it effectively.
Bias Trap
Many organizations fall into a confirmation bias trap when listening to customer feedback. We naturally tend to listen to our biggest customers and assume that their desires represent everyone’s. We also tend to focus on details that confirm our beliefs about why a customer might be dissatisfied. For example, if we assume a customer is unhappy due to pricing, we may cherry-pick feedback that aligns with this belief while ignoring other relevant data points about service issues or product quality. This isn’t intentional; it’s simply how our minds are wired to take shortcuts and reduce mental workload.
Companies also frequently fall victim to hindsight bias. When a large customer decides to leave, we often sit in conference rooms thinking, “We should have known this customer was unhappy.” In retrospect, it’s easy to spot the signs – declining annual spend, decreased customer portal visits, or canceled QBRs. However, without a structured process, these signs often go unnoticed in real-time.
Asking the Right Questions
Even if you do everything right in collecting customer signals, you can still get poor results without the right process for generating and analyzing feedback.
Using incorrect or biased methods to listen to customer feedback can lead to numerous problems. They can falsely convince you that you’re on the right path, giving you a false positive that causes you to over-invest your money, effort, and team resources. At VistaXM, we’ve created a structured approach that eliminates biases and gets to the root of customer issues. We then use these valuable insights to create an action plan for improving the customer experience in the most efficient way possible.
We ask the right questions – the hard questions. We uncover unsettling realizations about fundamental flaws in your approach, business model, or pricing, or that a major client is likely to churn. When account managers solicit feedback from customers, they often comfort themselves by asking questions that don’t truly de-risk the business or address critical, underlying issues. Our playbook is designed to do exactly that.
At VistaXM, we can’t make your business great – that’s up to you. What we can provide is a way to listen to customers, navigate the noise, and learn what they really want. Customer feedback is challenging by default – we’re here to fix that.
