Elevating the listening post
By Wayde Bull, Planning Director at Principals.
It’s hard not to grin at some of the job titles that corporates dream up to satisfy the egos of their up-and coming executives. But one recent new entrant to the career lexicon, the Chief Listening Officer, may actually deserve more serious consideration than first appearances suggest.
For what big business, anywhere in the world, doesn’t struggle to sincerely listen – and appropriately respond – to the myriad opinions of its customers? To act decisively upon their ideas – and frustrations – at an online pace? And to learn from the total spectrum of brand commentary out there, not only in the traditional feedback channels but also in the chaotic social media pool?
In most classically structured management teams, there isn’t a overt priority upon listening to and learning from customers. Sales and marketing teams manage the outbound brand message, customer service teams methodically manage inbound enquiries and complaints, corporate communications teams manage the collective reputation. But the bulk of team resources are expended on the message out, not on the learnings back. For who in the management team is really in charge of listening deeply to customers in order to drive systematic business improvement?
It’s businesses like Dell in the US that are seeking to place the voice of the customer at the heart of the management dialogue through the appointment of a Chief Listening Officer. They’ve assigned a senior executive with deep data mining skills to scour databases for references to their brand, to draw actionable insights from the data and to drive those insights into the hands of management peers best placed to act. It’s partly about managing the brand’s reputation in real time, but more fundamentally it’s about helping the leadership team to design a better business.
Unlike other ‘hands on’ social media roles emerging within big companies that are an adjunct to the frontline customer service team, Dell’s Chief Listening Officer role is inward facing. Helping the company to become aware of what’s being said about them in diverse online communities and guiding the business to appropriately reflect and respond. By giving the role real leadership clout in the business, the CEO clearly hopes to accelerate the speed with which frontline insights are translated into management team action.
Some elements of the role are about simply getting ideas and insights from the frontline into the hands of the right managers. For instance, direct customer feedback about product and services features – and failures – need to flow swiftly to those that design them. Praise from customers equally needs to be shared back with the business, with an eye to replicating these successes more often.
The most challenging listening task is to learn from the things that are said about brands online when customers are not seeking to directly engage the organisation in a formal response. Where the brand is the incidental subject of a conversation between peers, for better or worse. In a marketing environment where the opinions of friends and peers are more influential than any paid marketing message, the brand’s online reputation matters a great deal.
It’s in this conversational data stream that the Chief Listening Officer’s technical data mining skills are put to the test, as the appropriate company response back to the customer – or their online community – is dependent upon the context in which the brand comment was made. For instance, was the comment a response to a poor customer service experience, or was it the retelling of someone else’s poor experience with the brand? It’s the highly informal and unstructured nature of online brand commentary makes it a minefield to decipher. So perhaps it’s time for a few Australian companies to invest in deeper forms of in-house data mining expertise, either with or without the pretentious CLO label.
Wayde Bull is Planning Director of the brand consultancy Principals.
First published on AFR (www.afr.com) - 23rd September 2010
