Can You Understand Customers Without Talking to Them?

Recent market research has shown that 75% of senior managers and above in the United States NEVER talk to customers! Does this make sense to you? Not to me!

How can you possibly understand what's going on in the world without talking to customers? I understand that salespersons and Customer Relationship Managers will get nervous about having executives talk to customers. They may promise things that their organization cannot deliver, or say that an issue is "fixed" when the solution that they are talking about is in a future product, not the one the customer has.

Of course, the senior manager or executive will need to be coached on what to ask and what can and cannot be promised. They may want to read our book concerning the Voice of the Customer process. They can talk to their salespeople about what may be on the customer's mind and what problems they may be having.

Having said all of that, why not talk to customers? Why not get a first-hand account of what the issues are? The book describes how to collect and make sense of that data, how to organize it to take action. It is our feeling that ALL senior managers and above should have at least a few conversations with customers every year. There is no substitute for that experience. What do you think?

Can 900 Customers Be Wrong?

On Amazon they began selling milk for $3.99 a gallon. As a result, they got 900 people to rate the milk as very good or outstanding! One rater said that the milk was so good it was "worth its weight in gold times infiniti!" An analysis of Amazon's ratings of books shows that the "average" rating is 4.2 out of 5! When Amazon sold staplers, almost 60% of the raters gave the stapler a 5, with only one rater giving it a 3. Does this mean that there are no average staplers? I don't think so!

When people rate romance novels, for example, they tend to be fans of romance novels. So even a mediocre read is rated good by that audience. How many of us, when we are unhappy, will make the time and effort to find the item on the web and enter a "Poor" rating? If only fans of products are rating them, what happened to the old addage that an unhappy customer tells 30 people, while a happy one tells just a handful? Is that changing on the web?

Are the people inflating scores on the web sincere? There were stories of some companies inflating scores about their products on blogs, etc. Do we trust these scores?

Some companies are using online reviews as measures of the "Voice of the Customer." Is this wise?

We would recommend more traditional surveys, but they have problems as well. What are your thoughts?