Deriving Value from Listening to Your Customers

Just before Thanksgiving, I was in Walmart to make a return. It was a Saturday morning and the line at the returns counter was long. The more we waited, the more impatient the customers became, and increasingly, many took out their displeasure on the returns clerk with opinions on the poor service and lengthy wait.

When I reached the counter, the clerk was scowling and very tense. I smiled and complimented how well she was able to handle so many disgruntled customers. You could see her tension disappear and she also displayed her first smile since I had been there.

In that situation had she been able to listen and mentally record inputs from her customers? Had I offered her an idea on how to speed things up on the returns desk, would she be able to process the information? In this case, I did offer a suggestion and she did understand and take note of the input.

This story illustrates one of many difficulties in listening to customers. The first part of listening is hearing and, of course, hearing the customer necessitates that they speak. So our first consideration is “how do we get our customer to speak with us?” (Note: hopefully without creating such a negative experience as in this story)

Why is it that customers generally seem to be reluctant to give their inputs? I believe there are…