Listening to the Customer's Voice

Charting a profitable course through uncertain waters
Most people, and therefore most companies, have a serious problem with listening. Their hearing is fine – the problem is with absorption. The psychologists tend to put this down to one of two main factors. Either we’re not listening because we are too busy thinking what we are going to say when the other person stops talking, or we have filters in our brains that remove any inputs that challenge the orthodoxy.
The first is easy enough to spot – the age-old training course device of restructuring dialogues by requiring respondents first to summarize what the previous speaker has said is still remarkably effective. The second problem, though, is rather more insidious, and the articles in our themed section explore some of the main issues.
Banks and insurers must waste millions of pounds each year in delivering service that customers do not want, and risk far more by frustrating customers by not delivering the service that they do want. Tamsin Addison and Svetlana Gogolina believe that much of the problem is down to companies failing to listen to customers in the right way, and failing to respond properly to the messages that they do receive. Using new research that they have conducted at Robson Rhodes, they discuss ways in which companies can develop a stronger and sustainable competitive position.
To read the full article, please download the PDF above.