How to Listen Faster for Competitive Advantage

I once had a boss who told me the secret to being more productive was to sleep faster. And while I’m sure he was only joking, I have learned that the secret to staying ahead of the competition is to “listen faster” by monitoring and responding to Voice of the Customer (VoC) feedback in near real time.

So what does listening faster mean and how can solo-preneurs and local business owners implement a real time process for collecting and responding to VoC feedback? The following article provides practical tips you can use to collect, analyze, and take action on the feedback (solicited or unsolicited, positive or negative) your customers are only too happy to provide your business in today’s always on, 24x7, social media connected world.

Practical Tips for Monitoring What’s Being Said Online

Tip #1) Place links to highly visible feedback forms everywhere on your website. New technologies such as Speakpipe.com allow your customers to leave a voice mail directly from their computers without having to pick up their phone - you can see an example on my website at JohnWeisenberger.com. The listening faster competitive advantage here is to make yourself so easily accessible (and responsive) that your customer is never tempted to lash out using other channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Yelp, etc.

Tip #2) Set up Google Alerts (google.com/alerts) to monitor any mention of your company (and your competitors). Monitor your company name, product/service name and the names of any prominent people at your company. Be sure to include any conceivable misspellings, abbreviations and slang names for your product or company name too.

Also be sure to set your Google Alerts frequency to “as-it-happens” to make sure you are getting them in real time. This is your listening faster competitive advantage as many solo-preneurs and local businesses owners set their Google Alerts frequency to once-a-day in order to avoid interruptions during the day.

Tip #3) Set up your TweetDeck (tweetdeck.twitter.com) or Hootsuite (hootsuite.com) accounts to automatically monitor for your @name, hashtags about your company name, product name, conference name, etc. For example, you can monitor for hashtags such as #yourcompanyfail or #yourbigevent.

You can also use Twitter’s manual search engine (twitter.com/search-advanced) to look for past instances of Tweets about your brand or manually search it regularly to see what’s being said about your brand.

 Regardless of the tools you use, you need to be aware of what’s being said/tweeted about your business and be ready to respond to any negative comments as quickly as possible before the retweets escalate what could have been a small issue into a major public relations fiasco. Listening faster can help assure you’re never caught off-guard by an upset customer who could have been communicated with directly, one-on-one, outside of a public forum without thousands of others knowing.

Taking Action

My final tip for beating the competition by listening faster is to use a Virtual Assistant (VA) that has the responsibility of monitoring and analyzing your collected feedback and identifying those issues that require immediate attention from you or your designated Customer Experience Manager (CEM). Using a VA service that provides 24x7, follow the sun, phone and email coverage can be a very cost effective way to implement a faster customer service and VoC feedback monitoring process.

Remember, in today’s business environment, a small mistake combined with a slow response can quickly become a huge public relations problem for even the best run business. Don’t let a delayed response itself become more of a problem than the initial customer complaint. Listening faster can be your competitive advantage.