Are your customers waiting for a chance to talk to you?

My kids are on the verge of going back to in-person learning after being fully remote since March 2020. My fourth grader goes “back” full time on Feb. 16, and my sixth grader starts one morning a week sometime in February.

I tell you this for two reasons. First, if we were in a meeting, it would be covered right away: status of children’s learning seems to be the default small talk these days. Second, it’s on topic for this article about voice of customer.

How?

Because when we were thrust into the roles of remote learner/remote teacher’s aide, I felt an acute need to be listened to and treated as a customer. That pull grew even stronger when the new school year started and instead of talking about what families needed to make the school year awesome and supportive and affirming for students, all the conversation was around surviving distance learning and getting to safe reopening.

What a missed opportunity.

While my kids and I were figuring out new teachers, a new middle school, due dates and expectations, I jumped into a number of customer insight projects for my clients. This included research to understand customers’ brand experience for a fintech company, a content strategy in legal tech, and a set of interviews with accomplished women entrepreneurs and business leaders for a blogger.

I asked them questions about what mattered to them and why, about how they solved problems, about what could be better and what they didn’t care about at all, and about what my client was uniquely able to solve.

I also wished so very much that my kids’ schools were asking these questions of me. Assuming we’re in distance learning for six months or the full school year, what does success look like for you? How do you talk to your student about grades? If you had to choose between great test scores and turning in work on time, which would you prioritize? What motivates your child to do her best work? When does she feel safe and when does she feel anxious? What tools does he need to stay organized? What support are you able to give, and what challenges does that present for your learner? What else is happening in your home while school is in session? What hopes do you have when it comes to partnering with your school in supporting your learner?

If this had been on the list of volunteer needs, I totally would have done this project rather than organize the online book fair. Because to me the only way to know if your organization is hitting the mark is to talk to customers (or, in this case, customer-like stakeholders) all the time and look at your business metrics through the lens of their feedback, needs, stories, challenges and triumphs.

All the customer interviews I was doing (and all the questions my kids’ schools weren’t asking me) got me thinking about what makes a good voice-of-the-customer project. I asked my network and was rewarded with some great insight. Here are my takeaways:

Don’t think of it as a project. Seeking and using customer insight should be part of the way we do business, rather than as a step in a project plan or a box-checking exercise. It’s not just surveys or interviews, says Anna Stoll, a CX strategies. It’s “Listening with your eyes, ears, and heart. What do your customers say, do and respond to your brand? Responding with your energy, compassion, and authenticity. ... It is an ongoing conversation between two bodies....one maybe in a business and one a customer of that business's services, but it still needs to be humans communicating authentically.”

Be human, curious and sincere when you talk to customers: “You can't and shouldn't expect customers to tell you the exact next thing you should create,” says CJ Lechtenberg, a product development leader at Thomson Reuters. “What you need to do is listen to their pain points and the emotion behind them to determine what you can do to solve them. ‘Tell me more about that’ is my favorite way to really illicit the details,” she says. Eric Sleigh, a sales leader with NovoEd says “VOC is most meaningful when demonstrating a genuine interest in the customer, while listening with a lens aligned with purpose and mission.”

Be inclusive when you define “customer”: Go-to-market leader Tim Radaich put it best: “I find it helpful to really be clear about what role the customer plays in the relationship, e.g. end user, stakeholder, decision-maker...each can have a different experience and needs.” Are you hearing all the voices and incorporating them into your go-to-market? My kids’ schools are probably talking to teachers and looking at student data to assess programming, but I bet they could diagnose issues quicker if they also talked to parents.

Know what problem you’re trying to solve: User experience strategist Anne Thompson says that voice of customer efforts work best when aligned with the overall business strategy / goals. “You need to use a combination of methods to fill the holes in your knowledge and uncover new questions.” In my case, it would be great if the school district were clear on the learning goals they had for this distance learning year and then talked to families to understand the reality of meeting those goals. Customer experience leader Scott Morgan says, “The true voice of the customer comes from the unexpressed needs and the stories they tell of the highlights and perhaps lowlights. The most robust research is understanding what an effortless and frictionless experience means to a customer.”

Don’t be afraid to keep asking “why”: It can be a little uncomfortable, but I often have to ask the same question a few different ways or push with a “why.” Management coach Mark Capaldini suggests “going beyond superficial conversation to understand the ‘inner voice’ of the customer. To hear it requires some probing and careful listening.” Technovation Executive Director Lisa Schlosser agrees: “VOC isn’t just listening to the words but really understanding the challenges and needs. Asking ‘why’ many times and getting to the true ask takes patience and creativity.”

It’s easy for me to dwell on the times my school isn’t following these steps, but I realized that Lisa’s last point about patience – really time – is at the heart of the disconnect.

What I dwell on instead is this: our businesses probably have customers out there who wonder why no one is asking them these questions. Or maybe they think their problems are unsolvable, while we’re at our desks missing an opportunity. They aren’t going to come to you. I might call a teacher if an assignment is unclear, but I’m not knocking down doors to create school focus groups. I bet your customers aren’t either.

I love talking to customers! If you think there might be a good opportunity for me to talk to your customers, please let me know. I’d love to explore possibilities.

Photo by Sofiya Levchenko on Unsplash