Have you ever felt like you’re talking, but nobody is listening? Here’s Julian Treasure to help you fix that. As the sound expert demonstrates some useful vocal exercises and shares tips on how to speak with empathy, he offers his vision for a sonorous world of listening and understanding.

Excellent insight for any digital executive focused on really communicating with customers. It all starts with listening to our customers.

Listening to customers is critical to understand how the experience is working in reality. We think we designed things well. Did we?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs provides valuable feedback. Adding some capability around text analytics can bring some insight to what customers are thinking that are difficult to understand otherwise.

We are focused on our customers. We are making the transition to understanding the goals and needs from their perspective. We have put together a “voice of the customer” initiative. We are beginning to see some trends.

We may be using a variety of ways of getting the feedback, probably all multiple-choice questions, to hear what is important. We can quantify what is working and not working, from the perspective of the customer. We see the numbers.

It is also important to get unstructured feedback. Some surveys and phone calls should only approach it in an unstructured format. Senior executives should call customers every week to hear how things are going. Again, an unstructured approach.

All of this becomes very actionable. Particularly the unstructured answers. That is how we can continuously improve.