Understanding Your Customer's Story With Listening Paths

The only way to provide a good experience is to listen to what your customer is saying. If done right, listening paths can help you gain insight into the mind of your customer. They can also help you identify what you’re doing well, and what you need to do to stay ahead of the competition.

- Kirk Snider

MESSAGING PIPELINES

When I was younger, I would often play ‘The Telephone Game’ with my friends. You whisper a phrase to one person, who whispers it to another, and so on until the last person in the line repeats the message out loud for all to hear.

Inevitably, the phrase would be unrecognisable from its original form. Of course, it’s all fun and games when this is played at a get-together, but what about when you are trying to assess customer experience within your company?

If you’re a Customer Success (CS) Leader, ‘The Telephone Game’ is the last way you want to filter customer feedback. Assessing your company’s listening paths is vital to ensure that you have your finger on the pulse of customer trends and sentiments.

SILOED STRATEGIES

Measuring customer experience is a multi-stage process, but assessing your listening paths is a crucial step. In most organisations, a common assessment of problems related to customer experience goes as follows:

There is concern around how the customer experiences the service or product.

Survey results are pulled out from a semiannual report that identifies customer dissatisfaction concerning several departments.

Each department lead writes down what their department needs to address, leaves the meeting, and assigns a team to solve the problem.

The team tweaks current programmes or procedures, and the task is checked off as complete.