The relationship between your team and the clients you serve directly impacts your employees’ job satisfaction, retention rate, and focus on clients in their day-to-day work—so it’s imperative that your organization connects the team as closely as possible to customers.
Don’t just take our word for it. Here are a few customer centric quotes from business leaders that illustrate why the relationship between customers and employees is so critical!
Empower your team to get close to customers
Learn how to connect employees to customers by reading our tried and true playbook.
1. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
-Bill Gates
Employees across your organization can benefit from listening to your less satisfied customers every now and again.
Constructive feedback can help your customer success and support managers improve how they manage clients. It can help the product team develop solutions that better fit the customer’s needs. It can aid your executives in deciding where to invest in your organization—and so on.
You can include the less positive responses—along with the rest—in a place any employee can access, like an internal web page or a company-wide email. Here are some tips and tricks for sharing your feedback internally:
- Include the leading metric for measuring customer loyalty, the Net Promoter Score® (NPS)—assuming you track it. Also, if you asked the NPS question in one of our NPS templates or picked the question from our question bank, include its benchmark data. It’ll help employees understand how their score compares to that of other organizations.
- Add customizable charts for each of your closed-ended questions. They can help your team understand the key take-aways from your data, quickly.
- Below each chart, explain its results. This might include the reasons why the results look the way that they do.
- Consistently update your results. Your team needs to see the latest data in order to make timely decisions.
2. “Only marketers who are customer-obsessed and adapt to consumers’ changing behaviors in real time will succeed.”
-Shar VanBoskirk (Forrester Research)
Shar’s customer centric quote isn’t an exaggeration. According to Marketo, roughly 3 out of 4 B2B consumers think brands need to have a thorough understanding of their needs in order to be helpful. And about 2 in 3 consumers are willing to promote brands who’ve proven they care about them.
Help your marketers gain a deep understanding of your customers by adopting customer interaction reports (or as we call them, CIRs).
A CIR is a survey that an employee on your team fills out after they speak to a customer. In the survey, employees write about who the customer is, how they use your product/service, and what their overall impressions from working with your organization are.
CIRs can not only hold each marketer accountable for speaking with customers, but if you can share the survey results across the marketing team, they also allow everyone in the department to better understand your customers over time.
3. “Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.”
-Seth Godin
This elegantly-worded quote is a good reminder that the value of any product/service is directly tied to how effectively it solves customer’s needs.
Ensure that your team builds high-value product(s)/service(s) over time by getting your engineers and product managers—and any other teams that contribute to your product—to speak directly to customers.
Consider running a program where product-focused team members shadow colleagues in customer support. The experience of directly hearing from customers can help validate their assumptions or provide them with new product ideas they hadn’t previously thought of.
And of course, run surveys that ask customers for product feedback. A survey can help customers feel more comfortable in providing candid and thoughtful feedback, especially when you keep their responses anonymous. Survey responses are also easy to organize, analyze, and share—allowing your team to make decisions, quickly.
Get started with our customizable product testing survey template!
Use these customer centric quotes as inspiration for connecting your employees with customers. Your team will not only end up making decisions that better align with the customer’s interests, but they’ll also feel more engaged and content at work.
