Are You Listening to Your Customers?

Can you hear what your customers are saying? If so, that’s great. But for everyone else, are you not hearing because they aren’t talking, or because you aren’t listening? Although both are serious issues, the most common problem is that businesses are not effectively listening to their customers.

Listening has always been important, but with social media marketing playing such a vital role in business, it is growing even more valuable. Because it is both time-consuming and hard to measure, it is definitely a challenge. However, as pointed out in the above video, listening is critical in connecting businesses and consumers.

Unfortunately, many businesses neglect to have an actual listening plan with one person in charge of managing the efforts. Instead, they think that everyone in the business will pay attention to what’s being said. Wrong. There are always certain people that all the tasks fall on, and listening is often added to this list.

To prevent this from happening and to make sure that someone is listening, businesses should appoint one person to manage their listening and monitoring efforts. Having one person in charge is also important since that one person will be able to pick up on repeated trends and other insights over time. In addition, this person can determine on themes, relationships between these themes, problems, and more.

These listening efforts can be enhanced with both free and paid tools. A few free tools that are useful are Google Alerts, Technorati, HowSociable, and Trendrr. On the paid side, Radian6, Trackur, and BuzzLogic are all effective tools for listening and deciphering customer feedbac

Although some businesses do actually have great listening plans, not all of them use the data they collect to its full potential. In other words, businesses need to compare the listening data they collect to all the other consumer data that they have. Through this comparative analysis, businesses will be able to make more logical and informed decisions.

By applying these simple tips, businesses have the opportunity to really hear what their customers are saying about them. Never before have businesses had the ability to do this as accurately as it can be done today. For these reasons, businesses need to take advantage and listen to consumers.