The term customer is used frequently in marketing circles. In the local government and service sectors it is often shoved to the back of consciousness that it’s people that you are dealing with. For engineering and design companies, the customer is called the “client”, and I’m not sure if that’s because there are typically fewer of them, and therefore they are “more important”, or if it’s purely cultural.
Anyway, in many organizations, the loudest voices often command the greatest attention, and decisions become responses. Seth Godin has a riff today on customers, he says…
Here are three common listening mistakes:
1. Believing that your customers are monolithic, that they all want the same thing.
2. Believing that loud customers speak for all customers.
3. Worrying that if you don’t satisfy short-term, loudly articulated needs, you will fail.
Seth offers some advice to turn this trend around, including, “You decide, not your customers, where you want to go. Lead, don’t follow”, and a neat suggestion about collecting positive feedback.
What tactics do you use to deal with the loud people.
Technorati Tags: seth godin, marketing, business, engineering, customer, client, loud, annoying
If you enjoyed this post, why not try these ones:
- The Greenliness of a Product
- Familiar Things
- Great Minds Search Alike
- Seth Godin on Workaholics
- Customer Service
Mike Thomas