5 Tactics That Transform Listeners to Learners
The following excerpt is from The Age of Customer Equity: Data-Driven Strategies to Build a Sustainable Company. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Porchlight, and your local bookstore.
I write about three zones your organization will encounter on the road to customer-centric transformation: the Listening Zone, the Learning Zone, and the Leadership Zone. Let’s dive into how you can take your team from listening to learning.
As you enter the Listening Zone, stakeholders may be deep in the organization, perhaps asking: Do you trust the data? Have you taken action on it? The Listening Zone begins with technology and progresses to people's actions. There can be pressure for more results or “actionable insights” than the data can yield. The company begins to crave an impact from early technical investments, but this is held up by the misalignment of goals and metrics from a higher up in the organization. Instead, you get some small (sometimes sporadic) wins based on the performance of a particular campaign activity or the optimization of a particular channel or part of your site. The conversation moves from, “We are going to optimize our paid search based on clickthrough,” to “We are going to optimize our paid search terms to reduce product confused visitors.” Ultimately, reporting is the tool that drives customer-centric change and allows stakeholders time to develop a trusted, actionable customer-centric perspective.
In the Listening Zone, leadership is not sure what is possible. Either a critical event like COVID comes along, a competitor begins to dramatically gain market share, or someone has a vision that sparks the desire to transform the organization. Foundational technology in this stage does not have an immediate or high return on investment and, therefore, it is not easy to prioritize. There is much work to do (and a bevy of tools and vendors trying to do it for you) that can make it hard to get going. To move forward, you will need to ask the following critical questions:
What Technology Should Support the Listening Zone?
Listening cannot begin without the right technology. The goal is to hear the customer through the capture of rich, robust data, and to monitor the quality of that data. Monitors enable trust, which allow teams to defend their early data-driven decisions.
Technology tools and vendors quickly increase to support the desire to understand and measure mostly marketing success. That may be a new tool that helps you orchestrate social media better. Or maybe you start using an SMS system to reach customers. That's all part of technology. As the volume of data increases, it inevitably connects to the core reporting system that is attached to the website in early days, or even a data warehouse. I also recommend voice-of-customer systems to start capturing more detail about what customers want. Some of this may come from the call center, from onsite surveys, or even external research. Just make sure there is an individual customer identifier present.
How Should Teams Take Action in the Listening Zone to Gain Traction?
Companies within the Listening Zone generate a lot of one-off reports. Common questions analysts receive are:
How many visitors did we get to the website?
How many visitors came through paid search?
How many page views did a product receive?
These are good questions, but it can be exceedingly difficult for stakeholders to take action because more volume does not always mean more quality. Flip the script by changing to customer-centric use case reporting. Add extra power to your customer-centric insights through campaign codes.
How Should Executives Support the Listening Zone?
To gain continued momentum in the Listening Zone, a senior leader with vision needs to say, “Yes, we need to get in the game and here is where it is going to take us to long-term success.” Top concerns may include managing the budget and spending priorities. When immediate ROI is thin because analysts are just scratching the surface of customer insights, the critical blocker to overcome is budget to maintain your progress. A strategic roadmap will help align your early vision and reduce the feeling that this is a “leap of faith.”
What Processes Support the Listening Zone?
Processes may not be well-defined but if they are, it is mostly tactical: How do you set up paid search? How do you set up a campaign? Little is geared to the measurement or the optimization of the customer-centric data. Remember that “process” means you may be starting to set some customer-centric baselines and targets. You may be starting to understand what “good” looks like, and that analysis is driven by the campaign governance and the tagging governance. A process is about bulletproofing trusted data. Reporting framed around people (about who’s coming and what are they trying to do) tends to gain attention from a broader internal audience who want to help the customer, and that is critical for getting out of the Pit of Reporting Despair. This information, though still imperfect, drives a clearer line of sight to missing pockets of customer data, and that in turn drives the next stage of development.
What Metrics Support the Listening Zone?
In the Listening Zone, we monitor data quality and load speed to prevent companies from sliding back down the curve. These are defensive measures that protect your progress. In addition to the standard analytics reports you might receive, I recommend measuring custom ratios and defining use case segmentation to help expedite your progress. These are offensive measures that accelerate the customer-centric transformation. How do you know when you have filled in the important gaps and completed the Listening Zone? Ask yourself these questions:
Are stakeholders asking for specific data to support decisions which will be made? Could you tell me how many people viewed my product page?
Where did people come from who showed product confusion?
Are more business owners demanding they need the data to make actionable business decisions, but it is taking too long to get it? Count the number of requests and time to fulfill times the fully-loaded salary of a typical employee (2,080 working hours/$75K is $36/hour) and make the case to increase your budget.
If you answered “yes,” then it is an excellent time to enter the next zone of customer-centric maturity: Learning. We’ll cover that in a future post.