A client reveals their biggest problem: quiet customers who give no feedback, making it impossible to know if they're satisfied or about to leave. The pandemic moved relationships from in-person to remote calls, hiding the body language that used to signal trouble. High NPS scores masked real dissatisfaction.
Chapters
I'm gonna ask you a question that might sound familiar. If I gave you a magic wand, and of course that's one of the questions that we used in the workshop that folks can ask their customers. If I gave you a magic wand, what's the area in your world that you would wave it at and make a problem go away or solve it quickly, or just that you didn't have to deal with it?
The biggest thing that keeps me up at night are clients that are super quiet. I'd rather know what, what's going on with my clients. If I have a client that's silent, people tend to get into kind of a relaxed state and think, well, we're great, when in reality we may not be great, and they're, you know, moving their service somewhere else in 6 months. So if I had a magic wand, I would figure out like what's the best way to build relationships and build relationships with all of our clients.
That's very interesting. And so You don't assume that the quiet ones are really happy or really unhappy. I look back at my notes and you said, "Any insight is better than ignorance." Does that relate to the whole, like, if you don't know what they're thinking and if they're quiet, that's ignorance and that's not as good as having some connection with them?
Exactly. I have multiple examples of where we thought we were in a good place and come to find out we were not because we We weren't asking questions. We assumed no response was a good thing for us. And, you know, I think maybe 15 years ago, I think out in managing accounts, I've been in this field for a very long time, that it was good if you didn't hear anything. But nowadays people want to be engaged. They want to be listened to. Now people want a relationship with the person they're doing business with. And that's what we are trying to do here. And that's the reason why we hired you to help us kind of on this continuum to how do we ask the right questions, open-ended questions to get deeper and build these relationships.
I wanted to know what was on your whiteboard that was sort of one of the things that you said, this is something we have to tackle that did lead you to connecting with me and agreeing that you needed some help in this area of let's call it, you know, again, having more strategic customer conversations. What was the outcome you expected or what was the problem you were identifying?
This probably won't be no surprise, but the pandemic itself really turned things for us in that we used to be able to travel and meet people face to face. And you can gather a lot of information in person, the body language. And now we've been doing everything remote and through phone. For over a year now. And the one thing that came up to us is that we, we didn't have as strong of relationships as we thought we had. And we wanted to, you know, pivot to say like, what, what does the team need? What training to kind of get us to the next level to learn in this new environment that's not going to go away for a while? How do we build these relationships? So I think a bit of the pandemic and then of course, You know, there's always examples of clients where we thought we were in a good shape and then find out we weren't. And, you know, you start looking at all the signs. Everything was great. They were quiet, gave us high scores on NPS, but then come to find out there's other layers we were not in touch with that were not happy, that, you know, really controlled the budget for those products.
So you're looking for a sort of virtual relationship building In other words, I've had some other really senior folks like you talk about this, that you used to be able to go sit and sit back and talk and talk about other things. And, you know, you get to know people, you get to know each other, and it's a lot harder to do remotely. And as you said, I think you're right. It's not going to— this phenomenon is not going to go away anytime soon because companies, a lot of companies have realized they can get by just fine this way. But to your point, they need to have the skill sets to kind of, you know, level up so that they can do, you know, not let the relationships lag or build them even better than before.
