Should You Really Listen To Your Customers?

Brands, Social Media August 13, 2009 4 Comments @niallharbison

In the last couple of years as social media has been embraced by the world in general a new trend has been set where companies listen to what their customers have to say and are obsessive about feedback and how transparent they are in dealing with that feedback. I must admit that I was hooked into this personally as well and listened to every single thing our customers were saying online and answered all queries personally and incorporated what I thought our customers wanted into the latest editions of our products. I now think this might be totally and utterly wrong and to demonstrate that I have chosen 2 examples, one a company who listens to everything that is said about it and one that doesn’t…

Couldn’t Care Less What You Think

Some of you may have heard of a company called Apple who make some pretty snazzy products that are worshiped the world over. Do you think Apple listen to one thing we say to them? Do you think they are out there designing the next iteration of the iPhone based on our feedback or do you think they have got to where they are by having the most gifted set of engineers and designers around? At the end of the day what do you or I know about phones or music players? Apparently Apple monitor about 50 blogs worldwide to gauge customer feedback but by and large they back themselves to deliver quality products time after time. The day that Apple starts taking feedback from their customers about their products will probably be the day that sees the start of their demise.

Will Bend Over Backwards For Their Customers

When Seesmic launched they secured a large amount of funding and set about building a “video version of Twitter”. Their founder Loic LeMeur spent a huge amount of time building a team who would listen to every single piece of feedback their community had about their product and more often than not make changes accordingly. Video updates would often announce a new set of features as requested by the community. The end result being that Seesmic got so confused as to it’s identity that it became a desktop application for Twitter and has pretty much dropped the whole video idea. Seesmic now seems to be doing what it is good at itself rather than taking advice from others and with over 2 million downloads of their new desktop client it seems to be working.

Somewhere inbetween?

The truth is that these are 2 fairly extreme examples and that none of us will ever be as good at what we do as Apple but there are a lot of similar companies who don’t listen to a word their customers say (Ryanair etc) and are extremely successful but there are also companies who are very close to their customers (Zappos etc) who can make their customers feel part of the company and ingrained into their culture.

With the buzz monitoring tools that are available to us online nowadays you can hear every single voice and opinion on your product but the question you have to ask yourself is should you really listen to those voices?

Comments

http://Www.thevideoanalyst.com Rob Carroll

My favourite quote on this: “if I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses” – Henry Ford
http://www.spiderworking.com Amanda

Do you think that it’s true that Ryanair don’t listen to their customers. Don’t some of their silly marketing ideas like the ‘fat tax’ thing come from customer polls?

They listen and engage them and then get publicity from their crazyness. Yes their customer service is appalling and they may ignore feedback on their ‘product’ but can it really be said they don’t listen?
http://www.achievemarketing.ie/blog Denise Fay

What a great posting – short and snappy but really interesting with some great points.

I would agree with you that it’s somewhere in between – companies should and do listen to their customers. From a strategic perspective, companies, brand owners and business owners need to have a direction in which they want to proceed and stick within the parameters of it – neither stick to it in stone or move onto another path if something appears better or more lucrative.

Within these parameters, then customer feedback can be taken on board and assessed for the growth of the company.

I was involved in releasing a strategic product into the EMEA market. The product originated in the US. The first couple of names that the US guys suggested just didn’t work on our side of the pond. Thankfully, the US listened to my product specialists and customer reviews/feedback to the product.

We balanced the feedback – the name was decided and suited all countries but the functionality was more US than EMEA focused. The company had a greater share of the market in the US so for that reason it made sense somewhat!. But that is another topic entirely!

Thanks for the post – I really enjoyed reading it.
http://www.xlml.com/aehso John O’Shea

You’ve picked two pretty extreme examples.

Apple can completely ignore customers as they own a monopoly of mindshare in a particular technology have everyone wants and they are making money hand over fist.

Seesmic have a cool product but they are riding a hype wave by giving their customers a free service. I don’t see a viable monetization strategy there unless they eventually grow so much that twitter depend on them.

Neither serve as useful examples to someone trying to figure out how to balance listening to your customers with running a viable business.

As you hint, the truth is somewhere in between.

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