Here's How to Listen to Your Customers & Go From Good to Great

Go From Good to Great by Listening to Your Customers

This piece was written by Bolivar J. Bueno for MarketingProfs. I selected it because I thought the suggestions were excellent.Jan Gordon:Whatever you're doing to build an audience, customer or client base, listening at deeper levels is crucial for your business success.Engaging online with customers is not unlike real life. The difference is we have social media/networks and great tools to help us really get to know them and speak to their listening, then deliver solutionsIntro:"Years of research have revealed that the single most important factor that separates the good companies from the great companies Adidas from Nike is the ability to listen to their customers. That's the starting poing". Excerpt:"Dominant organizations, are those that can discern meaning from the information given. In other words, they're doing more than listening. They're hearing. And they're deriving their direction from what they hear".How, exactly, does such effective listening work? Here is what caught my attention: Understand the unconscious**A vast majority of human experience, communication and thought take place on an unconscious level - this is the first step to listening to the customer.**We're continually taking note of the enviornment around us - how people interact within that enviornment and what role we play as individuals**That information has a profound role in guiding customer behavior**Truly effective communication means being able to listen on multiple levels to what is said and what is left unsaidAccess Archetypal Images: A single image is worth a thousand words for a simple reason:**The unconscious mind does not bother with language. Symbols, pictures, and iconography speak directly to your customer's psyche,**bypassing and transcending all other forms of communication to take on the leading role in influencing your customer.Listening, then, also means understanding which archetypal images resonate most with your customers and are the most relevant to them.Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond"Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/PA0xBk]See it on Scoop.it, via Curation, Social Business and Beyond

http://www.scoop.it/t/content-curation-social-media/p/2713565675/here-s-how-to-listen-to-your-customers-go-from-good-to-great/original