A new product and brand emerges every period of time. It makes a competition is very tight. One crucial thing to win this competition is grabbing consumer attention. It means the company must find out the correct way to get consumer attention. There is the best practice to gain the attention, that is to provide what customers really need.

Now the question is, how do we know what customers really need? The answer is, by listening the customer. We can say it customer listening program.

Types of customers to listen

The more quality of listening you do, the more details you know about customer voice. So, you have to know all types of customer to listen. They are:

1. Your current consumer: customer who have experienced your service or your product.

2. Your competitor’s customer: people who is your competitor’s consumer.

3. Internal customer: your employee beside you who depend on internal service to provide their service to external customer.

Types of question to ask or thing that should know from the customer

I will give some examples which things that should listen from them based on type of customer.

At the type number 1, namely external costumer, the things that should know from them are:

- If they new customer, how does the first impression to you?

- If they your current customer, what things cause them to be loyal or less loyal to you?

- What complaints that they communicate to you?

- What type of product or service they like?

- What things their mention in the social media about you, positive or negative sentiment?

- What type of product or service they don’t like?

- How do they find you?

- What things that encourage them to mention positive sentiment about you?

- What things that encourage them to mention negative sentiment about you?

- Type and quality of services they need from you.

- Their degree of satisfaction and their suggestion to you.

- How are customers’ complaints resolved and their degree of satisfaction for this.

At the type number 2, namely competitor’s customer, the things that should know from them are:

- What factors that inspire them to choose your competitor than you?

- Why they do not buy your product or use your service?

- What things they like from your competitor?

- How do the they find your competitor?

- How do customers become loyal to your competitor and do repeat buying?

And many things to know, above are only the example.

In the internal customer item, the things that should know from them are:

- Are they satisfy with the current condition in your company?

- What things that encourage them to deliver a better service to your customer?

- What conditions that make them feel demotivate to serve the best service to your customer?

- What things that your employee really want or need from the company?

- How are consumer’s  complaints, and how the resolution is used by the employee to improve your company’s performance

And many more.

How do we perform customer listening program?

There are several ways of listening and learning. Here are the ways:

- Informal conversation with people.

- Participating to discussion forum groups.

- Customer satisfaction surveys.

- Email questionnaires.

- Telephone interviews

- Getting customer trend and all the related things report from others.

- Actively and directly listening what are the people mention in social media site.

- Actively and directly listening or reading  what are the people mention and comment in blog, newspaper, magazines, TV, radio, etc.

- Performing analytics, such as: Google trend to know which keywords are mostly search and the trends in the future, trending  topic in twitter, and so on.

- Comment and feedback survey.

- Direct interview with the customer.

- Suggestion and evaluation form.

- Information-gathering technique, such as: information gathering from social media site.

There are several social media site like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter that have search engine. You can use this feature to get information that you want. The simple way is find the things you want to know by typing the keyword in their search engine. For example: typing your brand or the product, afterwards you will find all things that are related to what keyword that you have typed at search engine.

Benefits of customer listening

There are a lot of values if you persistently doing customer listening program. These are the short and simple illustration for this, they are:

- Understanding customer need and customer want.

The difference between customer need and want is, want is for short term things that are desired by customer, whereas need is for long term.

By understanding customer need, you can develop new product / modification product or service which are desirable mostly by customer.

- Resolving a problem.

By listening your customer, you can respond appropriately and fast before the problem growing higher. We can say it preventive maintenance system, for example: listen what is the problem in the social media site, try to resolve it before the problem become viral in the social media.

- As an input into new product or modification product.

This advantage is related to the first one. In addition to this, you will know and understand of changing customer needs and then improve you service to deliver a solution to the customers.