Listen Up!

There’s one voice that matters more than any other: the voice of the customer. Learn how to fully understand the number one source of your organization’s prosperity, profits, and productivity. These actionable insights will help you to better connect with your customers and gain an undeniable lead over your competition.

Listen Up!: How to Tune In to Customers and Turn Down the Noise teaches readers how to create a customer experience that’s built on listening and designed for engagement. Author and Salesforce executive Karen Mangia has created a practical and comprehensive examination of how best-of-breed companies listen and respond to customer demands—creating a foundation of customer success, loyalty, and brand evolution.

Listen Up! features discussions about:

How to go beyond the survey: best practices associated with customer understanding, customer experience, and customer service

• How to move from deep listening to data-based insights into customer behavior
• The statistics and stories behind companies, organizations, and even city governments that have created a customer-centric culture
• How powerful new questions can offer a fresh perspective into any customer, anywhere: empowering your customer-facing teams, including sales teams, in the current market
• Winning greater mindshare, and market share, with a fresh look at the future of customer service, customer success, and customer satisfaction

Perfect for anyone in a leadership or management role in a customer-facing organization, including sales teams, business development leaders and marketing professionals, Listen Up! belongs on the bookshelves of executives, customer service and success employees, and leaders who want to better engage with the one voice that matters most: the voice of the customer.

Foreword xiii

Chapter 1 The Breakdown Before the Breakthrough 1

How Do I Manage This Crisis? 2

Recovery and Resilience 3

Serving at a Higher Level 4

The Breakdown Leads to a Breakthrough 4

Chapter 2 Don’t Bet on Your Blind Spots 9

How “What If?” Became, “Why Not?” 9

Would you be willing to bet your business—or your career—on a single number? 10

The Challenge: We’re asking the wrong questions—and we’re asking the wrong questions of the wrong people 11

The Greatest Nightmare Any CEO Can Face 12

Never Again 14

Are you willing to do what it takes to retain 100 percent of your customers? 15

Decrease Distance Between Your Home Office and the C-Suite: First Steps 18

Be Selective 18

Why Stop at One? 18

Chapter 3 The Beginner’s Mindset 21

A False Sense of Security 23

Listening is the First Step in Decision Making 25

Chapter 4 Big Impact 27

Chapter 5 When Organizations are Out of Alignment 37

Action is Where Mantras and Missions Come to Life 39

How often does your customer feedback tell you what you want to hear rather than what you need to know? 40

If you consistently achieve your customer experience improvement targets, are you measuring what matters to your customers? 40

Do perfect scores alert you to risks? Competitive threats? When a customer is about to leave you? New engagements or sales opportunities? 41

How often are you interested in your customers’ feedback, rather than invested? 43

Chapter 6 Defining the Digital Divide 47

You are Not Alone 49

People Before Process 50

How Big is Tourism in Amsterdam? 51

Transportation Considerations 52

Redefining Crowdsourcing 52

A Single Signal is Effectively False 53

Chapter 7 Better Questions, Better Answers 59

Out of the Mouths of Babes 62

Chapter 8 Got Genius? 71

Moving Day: Entering the Unknown 72

Finding Genius 74

Chapter 9 Genius, Revealed 83

Myth #1: Customers Demand Quick Answers and Short Call Duration Times 87

Myth #2: The Survey is the Solution 87

Myth #3: “Ease of Doing Business” is an Operations Play, so Attacking It Like a Project is Best 88

EODB is Not a Project, It’s a Purpose 88

Go Beyond the Survey 89

Myth #4: Customer Support is about Resolving Complaints 90

Exec Listening Creates New Results 90

From Black Hole to Above Goal in 88 Days 91

Myth #5: We don’t Have the Resources to Transform Our Customer Experience/Customer Support Right Now 93

Myth #6: Great Customer Support is about Agent Knowledge, Productivity, and Extensive Training 93

Make It Easier on Yourself 94

Myth #7: The Process is the Solution 96

Chapter 10 The Secret Sauce 97

What Happens When Ego Enters the Conversation 100

What’s Necessary Isn’t Always Easy 100

Chapter 11 Dealing with Disruption 111

A New Destination 115

The Right Players at the Right Time 117

Chapter is How to Win 121

The Customer Advisory Board 123

Press Pause on PowerPoint 124

Chapter 13 Moving at the Speed of the Customer 129

The Value in Bias 130

Lack of Knowledge 131

Misinformation Endorsement 131

Why You Have to Earn the Customer 135

Owning the Journey 135

New Value, New Solutions 136

Human-Centered Design 139

Chapter 14 Look Who’s Talking 141

Finding Value 143

A Match Made in Heaven 144

The Customer Experience Assessment 144

Building the Relationship 149

Community Kills Competition 153

Chapter 15 Moment of Signal 155

Restoring Hope 156

About the Author 161

Acknowledgments 163

Index 167

KAREN MANGIA is Vice President, Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, where she engages current and future customers around the world to discover new ways of creating success and growth together. She has been featured in Forbes and regularly writes for the over 42,000+ employees of Salesforce—an ecosystem that reaches over 3 million people worldwide. She is the author of Working From Home: Making the New Normal Work for You and Success With Less: Releasing Obligations & Discovering Joy.

Savvy business leaders know that the "customer is king." The voice of the customer is what matters most in critical business decisions. How are you responding to customer concerns? Your answer is crucial to the growth of your business and your revenues.

But are companies really listening to their customers?

Thriving companies understand that listening is the first step in leadership. Listen Up! offers busy business leaders a playbook for building a culture that is grounded in creating customer experiences that deliver customer success. Author Karen Mangia—customer experience expert and Salesforce executive—shows you how to leverage better questions to get better answers—with strategies that go beyond the survey. More meetings aren't the answer: better metrics and better results are closer than you might think. But only when you are listening to your customers across the entire lifecycle of the journey.

Designed as a practical guide, Listen Up! is filled with the proven best practices, strategies, and techniques to move leaders from deep listening to deep understanding, from powerful statistics to powerful stories. And don't forget the cautionary tales, designed to provoke your organization into greater performance. For every customer-focused organization, there's always an opportunity to go deeper, to discover more, and to serve at a deeper level. This book shows you how, with best practices from internationally-renowned B2B and B2C brands that have transformed their approach to customer success. Mangia also includes hands-on exercises you can use, today, to reshape how you interact with your customers. Rethink how teams work together, with guidance on how to truly align around the one voice that matters most: the voice of the customer.

Do you know how to engage in a dialogue that lets your customers feel heard, listened to, and understood? Can your leadership team take ego out of the conversation so that you can hear what needs to be said? This book will show you how to listen without defensiveness. Welcome to your road map to a deeper understanding of what it really takes to do what your competition won't, or can't. Ultimately, Listen Up! is about the most important connection in any organization: the connection to the customer.

Praise for LISTEN UP!

"Great leaders know that strong relationships and meaningful connections begin with listening. This book provides the tools to turn down the noise and listen to your customers in ways that will help move your business forward." —Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global, cofounder of The Huffington Post

"Listening is where it all begins. The same thing that makes a great song can make a great company. What makes the music meaningful is listening to it. Read this book, and you will hear how you can help your customer to create something powerful and unforgettable." —Michael Feinstein, five-time Grammy Award nominated musician and founder of the Great American Songbook Foundation

"Powerful and insightful: this book will teach you how to stop thinking about your customers, and through deep listening, start thinking like your customers." —Tony Rodoni, Executive Vice President, Customer Experience, Salesforce

"I always say, 'Simple is the new sexy' and simply put, if you want to make your business better, it's time to Listen Up! You can lead your audience to want and desire your offering when you understand exactly what they want and need. That is the strongest possible structure for connecting to your clients and your audience." —Brant Pinvidic, Producer of Pawn Stars, Bar Rescue, and The Biggest Loser, author of the bestselling book, The Three-Minute Rule

"Powerful ideas for turning customer service into customer success. Karen fills the pages with powerful personal stories and unflinching corporate examples of companies that aren't afraid to push the envelope when it comes to customer loyalty, service, and success." —Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, coauthor of The Customer Success Economy

"If you're an executive looking to grow your relationships with customers, Listen Up! must be on your bookshelf. Karen's philosophy on the pillars of customer success translates into a powerful playbook, offering business leaders practical tools to engage customers in a meaningful way." —Carmen Simon, PHD, Chief Science Officer at Corporate Visions and author of Impossible to Ignore