This is the Brainfood definition of Customer Listening.
The goal of listening is to capture a full and accurate version of what is being said and then make sense of it in the exact same way that the customer intended.
I reckon this makes sense whether you are on a one-to-one voice call with a customer, a live chat session, a face to face presentation for a group of customers. Or if you are deciphering a gazillion voices via your Listening Post as you try and tune into your ‘social’ customers. It’s all the same challenge.
Let’s break the definition down into its key ideas and see what emerges as we concentrate our attention on what each one means.
First off, notice that perfect ‘recall’ and ‘understanding’ are aspirational. They are the goal of listening. No-one expects to achieve goals every minute of every day. Ok, maybe you know a few people like that, but let’s face it, they are just too intense to be around for long.
So what’s the point then? Simply this. If you see yourself as a professional communicator, it’s a standard you will want to achieve as often as possible. If you are a leader of such people, you will want to support that ambition. If you are a social strategist, you will use that standard as a kind of North Star to get the best Signal:Noise ratio you can produce.
Let’s go deeper into this idea. Each time the standard is achieved, you and your organisation are perfectly positioned to make the best possible response. What that looks like in a sales conversation or a service interaction all depends on the circumstances. But your options as a communicator are massively boosted whenever you’ve ‘nailed’ the listening part of the communication cycle.
If you want further evidence where the smart money sits check this out. It shows that the collective wisdom throughout history has recognised the importance of excellent listening skills.
So with that set of insights under our belt, let’s have another look at our definition of Customer Listening.
The next point as we move along the definition is the phrase “capture a full and accurate version”.
“Full” suggests nothing can be left out. “Accurate” suggests the auditory data being captured in our working memory is bit perfect. Or 100% the same as the original.
This is an idea that is simple enough to understand but difficult to achieve in practice! For instance, what percentage of customer conversations you get involved in would pass that test? You might try and wriggle out by saying you and the customer understand each other just fine, so what’s the big deal?
Well the reason why a perfect copy is needed can appear so obvious it passes us by. So let’s spell it out. Trying to make sense of what has been said using a partial, inaccurate version always increases the chances of misunderstanding and therefore should be avoided.
This is particularly important in the context of dialogue with customers where we need to be certain our version is the same as theirs. Complaints are an obvious example. But more generally if you claim to be a customer focussed person or brand then it’s your intent to get under the skin of what is being said by a customer. If so, you need to be making use of everything they have actually said.
It’s important to understand though that most of us, much of the time, discard significant chunks of inbound communication. We are so adept at this, we do it without even thinking and therefore without awareness of its impact on what we register has been said. In a later post I’ll touch on some of the evolutionary reasons why we need to filter the volume of external stimulus and how this impacts our capacity to listen effectively.
In fact getting it 100% right is seldom that easy, especially when distraction is introduced. Maybe you know the well known example from World War I of a message being sent down the trench line. The actual words said were “SEND REINFORCEMENTS, WE’RE GOING TO ADVANCE”. The words heard, as a result of the background din, were “SEND THREE AND FOURPENCE, WE’RE GOING TO A DANCE!
Notice both versions retained a meaning. But only one was accurate.
The next phrase for consideration is ‘make sense of it’. Again if that sounds easy, the internal processes that humans use to generate meaning are incredibly complex and sophisticated, even if the experience of doing it seems effortless.
As adults, most of us have forgotten just how smart we are at translating, in real time, a series of sounds into language we understand. Try listening to a language you don’t speak. Or play a song you know backwards. You will soon remember what it was like to be confronted by something you cannot make sense of.
Our ability to make sense of language is a challenge we confront early in life. Already by the age of 8 months, we have learnt how to use the differences in a person’s voice to help us make sense. At this stage in our abilities, we are just using the stress put on individual words to break the stream of sounds into separate sounding words which we then start to recognise.
Later we learn how different voice qualities in the speaker, such as their pitch, tempo and intonation, can convey differences in meaning. For example, a statement versus a question. Or the kind of speaking style – an adult versus child. Or the emotional state of the speaker – happy versus sad.
So the huge complexity of making sense of what we hear is something we have to master at a very early age. No doubt that’s why the speed of learning in the first 24 months of our lives is never matched for the rest of our life.
Unpicking just how smart we are at making sense of sound is an important reminder of the huge organisational challenges in making sense of what customers are saying. Can we replicate our highly sophisticated sensibilities as algorithms and get anywhere close to replicating the skill of an eight month old human? Think about that the next time you are poring over the latest sentiment analysis.
That’s why all forms of customer listening which are not ‘one to one’ events between people need to come with a health warning. They are indicative at best and probably way short of the sense being originally conveyed. Accept that and they remain useful. Imagine they are accurate and you are peddling fiction as fact.
The last phrase in the definition is “in the exact same way that the customer intended”. This is something that builds on the previous stage of making sense.
For instance I can make sense of the sounds I’m hearing and recognise them as words, but I might not understand their meaning accurately. Active listening has been described as “an intent to listen for meaning” which captures the essence of what we are trying to convey here very well.
The problem with words is that they hold a different connotation for each person based on their own life experiences. Words have a unique effect in the mind of each person, because each person’s experience is unique. Those differences can be small, but the overall effect of the differences can become large enough to cause misunderstanding.
Another way of looking at the range of meaning that a word can have is contained in this well known research snippet.
Most people use around 800 words on a regular basis. Those 800 words however have 14,000 meanings. That’s around 17 meanings per word on average. The challenge is therefore deciphering which one is intended within a particular communication.
What we can learn from this is that the business of accurately understanding what another person intends to communicate is a major undertaking and never a guaranteed success. Consequently, the appropriate mindset for a professional communicator is that I can never tell you what you have said, only what I have heard.
Hmmm. I wonder how that insight might pan out as an advanced organisational workflow?
The other point that needs to be taken into consideration is that research has shown spoken words only account for 30-35% of the intended meaning being conveyed by the speaker. The rest is transmitted through nonverbal communication. This is why people say you have to listen not just with your ears but with your whole body. Some describe it as their sixth sense.
That suddenly makes multi-channel customer interaction sound a whole lot harder!
Let’s bring this last part of the definition to a close. Putting the speaker’s message into proper context is essential to duplicate the speaker’s original intended meaning. In practice we do this through a multitude of checking procedures that calibrate and confirm understanding.
Eye contact and body language provide some of the strongest indirect signals in face to face situations. When we don’t have those visual checks, we use direct questions to check understanding and maybe active listening techniques such as paraphrasing to signal what we have managed to understand.
Put It All Together And What Do We Have?
If all the phases of the listening process happen in the way we have just explored, then the goal of listening as defined here is also achieved. But our success in hitting that standard is pretty random. The understanding of what it takes to really listen is not widely known and therefore is not commonly practiced.
The follow on from this is that organisational listening is equally primitive in its effectiveness. So if your Voice Of The Customer effort has just won gold at Cannes, remember where you really are in the evolutionary cycle of things!
The other pragmatic observation is that the human race manages to get by despite this limitation. To which I say Yes but how much better could it be? And if real customer engagement is your ambition how much better does it need to be?
By aiming to make our listening ‘just exactly perfect’, we will find ourselves getting that much closer to recognising our customer’s communication priorities. Hear what is not spoken but is still being conveyed. And recognise the time and opportunity to deeply engage them and rebuild that trust which only the ‘human touch’ can generate.
That’s a real skill we had all better start nurturing if we are serious about this ‘customer’ thing.
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