“Lis­ten­ing” ver­sus “communicating”

How often have you heard that it is impor­tant for a com­pany to “lis­ten to its customers”? That would be hard to dis­pute, but lis­ten­ing is only part of it. In order for a com­pany to be really suc­cess­ful, it must engage in reg­u­lar, two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion with its customers.

A com­pany must lis­ten to cus­tomers so that it under­stands things like:

• what pain they are experiencing
• what they have tried in order to solve their pain
• what they con­sider good value for a solu­tion they purchase
• what feed­back they have on the company’s prod­uct after they have bought it

A com­pany must speak to cus­tomers to tell them things like:

• what the com­pany heard from them
• how the company’s prod­ucts address their problems
• why the company’s approach is the best
• what they can expect from the com­pany in the future

Some com­pa­nies don’t believe in telling cus­tomers any­thing about their future prod­uct plans. That’s an oppor­tu­nity lost because the more a com­pany treats its cus­tomers like a true part­ner, the more loyal those cus­tomers will become.

The con­ven­tional argu­ment against shar­ing too much about future plans is that doing so makes life too easy for the company’s com­peti­tors. Such think­ing betrays an inse­cu­rity — if the com­pany were really con­fi­dent in its unmatched under­stand­ing of the cus­tomer, its supe­rior abil­ity to develop inno­v­a­tive ideas, and its unpar­al­leled abil­ity to exe­cute, it wouldn’t be so reluc­tant to share openly with its customers.

How com­pa­nies com­mu­ni­cate today

The inter­net has been as trans­for­ma­tional for a company’s abil­ity to inter­act with its cus­tomers as it has been for so many other things. Now there is a wealth of options for real­time, two-way communication.

Of course, a web site is essen­tial. A pro­fes­sional and attrac­tive web pres­ence is the min­i­mum ante required of any orga­ni­za­tion that expects to be viewed as a “real com­pany” by its cus­tomers. Web con­tent tools and tech­nolo­gies have come so far that main­tain­ing a web pres­ence and keep­ing the con­tent on it “fresh” has never been easier.

Typ­i­cally, the web site serves as the pri­mary vehi­cle for dis­trib­ut­ing the most up-to-date infor­ma­tion about the com­pany. But now the web site is as use­ful for inbound com­mu­ni­ca­tion as it is for out­bound com­mu­ni­ca­tion. By incor­po­rat­ing an inter­ac­tive blog, the com­pany can enable a straight­for­ward and easy-to-use mech­a­nism for cus­tomers to pro­vide direct feedback.

More and more com­pa­nies are includ­ing Face­book in their mar­ket­ing cam­paigns, with some run­ning expen­sive pro­mo­tions to accu­mu­late “Likes” by users. The pop­u­lar­ity of Face­book among younger users makes it essen­tial as a way to reach a more youth­ful demographic.

Once the com­pany achieves real sales trac­tion, find­ing a scal­able way to dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion to a large num­ber of cus­tomers becomes very impor­tant. Twit­ter fits this role very nicely.

Despite the fact that, as a tech­nol­ogy, email has been around for almost two decades, it still remains a very pow­er­ful arrow in the company’s quiver. Not only does it serve as a scal­able mech­a­nism for out­bound com­mu­ni­ca­tion to cus­tomers, but it also pro­vides an effi­cient, doc­u­mentable way for cus­tomers to sub­mit sup­port requests and information.

At LightAr­row, we have found that doing all of these things helps to make us the best com­pany we can be. But, we go even fur­ther. For instance, we allow our users to com­ment on any of the prod­uct pages of our web site. We feel this level of open­ness with our cus­tomers is essen­tial if they are going to feel like we value their feed­back and trust them to pro­vide it. And not only do we share our future plans, we share our prod­uct roadmap, com­plete with tar­get dates. This gives our cus­tomers con­fi­dence that we will con­tinue to inno­vate, and that their faith in us and their invest­ment in our prod­uct are well-placed.

Of course, if our cus­tomers ever come up with an idea for a way to com­mu­ni­cate with us that we’re not already using, we’re all ears!