Summary: If you don’t deliver an exceptional experience to your customer that make them want to shout your name from the rooftops, you might die. I mean this. Companies are faced with the choice to either listen to their customers and thrive or eventually die.<br> Our world is dominated by social media, where our customer’s voices are broadcast louder and wider than ever before. No matter what industry you’re in, you need to listen. In this episode, I talk with Sean McDade, author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Listen-Die-Lessons-Customer-Feedback-ebook/dp/B07DN33YTS/&tag=authorhour-20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Listen or Die</a> and customer experience expert with more than 20 years of experience. You’ll get advice on every step of the process so you’ll know how to turn customer feedback into gold and actually deliver a clear ROI to your company.<br> By the end of this episode, you’ll know how to develop a competitive edge just by managing your customer experience to drive real, impactful business results.<br> <br> <br> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Listen-Die-Lessons-Customer-Feedback-ebook/dp/B07DN33YTS/&tag=authorhour-20" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"></a>Get Sean’s new book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Listen-Die-Lessons-Customer-Feedback-ebook/dp/B07DN33YTS/&tag=authorhour-20" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Listen or Die</a> on Amazon.<br> Find out more at <a href="http://peoplemetrics.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">PeopleMetrics.com</a>.<br> <br> <br> Sean McDade: I’ve always been in the world of market research, where we’re reaching out to customers to ask them questions. When I first started my company, there was a client who is doing that on a periodic basis—maybe once a year they would survey their customers and ask them what was going on, how they feel—but they were really struggling because they kept losing customers.<br> Every year, they said, year over year, they kept losing more customers.<br> I would work with them and do our survey once a year, but we weren’t really a bit able to help them more than say “Hey, you know what? Service isn’t great and your call center has to get a little bit better…”<br> <br> They would take these recommendations, but they really struggled with putting them into place.<br> <br> What I realized is that companies like this needed to listen a lot more regularly than once a year or ounce every two years. We started to work with them to identify where were they really falling down with their customers.<br> We identified that touch point and started to measure it regularly.<br> Basically, after every customer visited their store, we would send out a survey, asking how was it, what did you like, was there a problem? The book really was borne out of the lessons that came out of working with this customer and helping them really save their business and helping them not only reduce churn but turn it into net positive loyalty. Meaning, they have more customers year over year than they lose.<br> I think that’s obviously the goal of every business is to not only reduce the customers they lose but gain more of them.<br> <br> The Big Idea behind Listen or Die<br> Charlie Hoehn: What became more apparent, and how come it was much easier for them to make the changes necessary?<br> Sean McDade: It was like the big revelation. We talk about this in the book. It is when you’re listening to customers, it’s not good enough to just listen and tally up the results and figure out, “25% of our customers are dissatisfied, so what are we going to do?”<br> What we actually did is, every time a customer had a poor experience and they were, say, dissatisfied or revealed a problem, we alerted that company to that problem for that customer. We helped them create a process for they would follow up with that customer—we call it “close the loop.” Basically, it’s “make it right.”<br>
