Why customers won’t tell you if your bum looks big

Ask someone who likes you whether your bum looks big and there's a reasonable chance you won't get a completely straight answer.

Not because they're deliberately lying to you, but because most people don't particularly enjoy delivering uncomfortable truths.

The same thing happens in business.

Ask a customer, “Are you happy with everything?” and they'll often say yes. Ask whether there's anything you could do better and you may get “No, everything's fine.”

Then one day they leave.

What people say isn't always the whole story

This is one of the reasons I'm cautious about taking customer feedback at face value.

How you ask the question matters. Who asks it matters. When you ask it matters. And sometimes what somebody doesn't say is every bit as interesting as what they do.

A tick-box survey can tell you useful things, particularly when you have enough responses to identify patterns. But it won't necessarily tell you why somebody feels the way they do.

That's where asking better questions - and being prepared to keep asking - becomes important.

Don't just ask whether they're happy

If I want to understand what's really happening, I'm much more interested in questions such as:

• Why did you choose us in the first place?

• What nearly stopped you?

• What do we do particularly well?

• Where do we make things unnecessarily difficult?

• What would make you buy more from us?

• What would make you leave?

• What do you think we could do better?

• Who else did you consider, and why?

And then there is probably the most useful question of all:

Why?

The first answer is often only the beginning.

Look for patterns, not individual opinions

One customer telling you something doesn't automatically make it true.

But when several customers independently say the same thing, I start paying attention.

Then I want to compare what they're telling me with what the business thinks is happening, what the data shows and what I can observe elsewhere.

Sometimes everything lines up. Sometimes it doesn't - and those gaps can be particularly revealing.

Customer feedback is evidence, not the answer

I believe strongly in talking to customers, but their feedback is one source of evidence rather than the answer in isolation.

Customer conversations can tell you an enormous amount. So can the numbers, the sales process, marketing activity, systems, what employees tell you, what competitors are doing and what actually happens when somebody tries to buy from you.

The job isn't to conduct a customer survey and declare the problem solved. It's to put the evidence together, look for the patterns and understand what they're telling you.

And sometimes you need somebody independent to ask

Customers may be more candid with somebody who isn't directly involved in the relationship, particularly when the questions go beyond whether they're simply “satisfied”.

But independence isn't valuable because it magically guarantees the truth. It's valuable because it can create a different conversation - one where somebody feels able to say what they really think without worrying about upsetting the person they deal with every day.

And that can uncover things the business simply wasn't hearing.

If you suspect there's more going on in your business than the feedback you're currently getting suggests, let’s have a conversation.