Do you find that you frequently make important business decisions without taking your customer’s point of view into account? And that as a good business leader, you want to factor in your customer’s voice, but don’t know where or how to start?

Well, you could try an experiment. Next time you are in an internal meeting, to talk about important issues and make decisions, imagine that one of your customers is at the table. You could try this at any of your meetings – a board meeting, an engineering design meeting or a sales meeting. Imagine that your customer has a seat at the table. Give them a voice. Treat them as a peer. And when you are debating an issue, or about to make a decision, turn to the (imaginary) customer and ask them what they think.

There is no doubt that if the customer were actually there in our meetings, we’d all have better meetings and make better decisions.

But practically speaking, you can’t actually put a (even an imaginary) customer in your meetings.

Or can you?

With KANA Service Experience Management (SEM) you can. Customers are already voicing their opinions, letting you know what they think and want:  online, through regular services channels like email, chat, phone and in social media. Now you can make sure you hear them, and they hear you—in one clear and consistent voice across all customer touch points. KANA’s listening solution, using advanced text-analytics built specifically to handle natural language and ‘internet speak’, automates the nearly impossible task of really listening—to all your customers, all the time. By uncovering the topics, meaning, and sentiment in customer conversations, you can accurately spot problems and trends, determine causality, and report actionable insights from the massive amounts of customer communications and social media chatter.

It’s like inviting customers to your internal meetings – all the time.

And if you are in the minority that thinks listening isn’t important – just think back on the last five debates you had, and the decisions you made. How would they be different if you knew what your customers think?

In this ‘age of the customer,’ to respond to your customers’ needs, you have to know what they want. So Listen to them. It’s the only way to stay relevant.

(Vikas Nehru is VP, Product Marketing, KANA)

Related posts:

1. Your Customers Speak in Idioms, Phrases, and Sentences; not Keywords!