Your Customer is Smarter Than You...

If the crowd is prophetic, is your business listening?

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.

The difficulty business’ face is that they are not built to listen to the crowd. They focus energy on improving efficiency, growing new markets or getting their latest product to market. Listening to the crowd can seem like a daunting task – there is so much information coming from so many different sources (customer chatter on calls/emails/chat/SMS directly into your company, front-line staff, community sites, blogs, surveys etc). Often the attitude is “what do they know, we are the specialists in this area.” How do you listen effectively to a sea of feedback and better still, how do you implement that back into your business?

The key to using the crowd’s prophesy is to look for patterns in customer feedback, analyse this feedback (and suggested changes) by assessing value to both company and consumer and then feed it back into the business in manageable, bite sized chunks. But the real trick is to proactively challenge your staff to use that data to improve your product/service, change business processes and improve customer satisfaction.