At one point in time, the Singer Corporation had more than 12,000 people working in a single plant. They were selling more than a million sewing machines a year and had hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. They were one of the most important manufacturers in America. It was fun …while it lasted!
When was the last time you even thought about Singer?
History is fraught with examples of companies, like Singer, that suddenly fell off the radar screen for failing to listen to their customers or to spot market trends. Or because they were late to adapt to new technology.
Think about ‘Hollywood Video’ missing a simple process change: rent-movies-via-mail. Hollywood Video have, in fact, disappeared. Think Sony, who once owned the portable music device—remember the Walkman?!—but were stomped by digital technology. Or think Kodak. Did they think digital photography would be a flash in the pan?
Had these companies been listening to their customers, they would have realized that people don’t want to carry ten cassette tapes while they are jogging, or replace film every 24 photographs, or spend 15 minutes driving to the local video store only to find that the new release is out of stock.
I don’t have the mantra for success – it’s complicated and driven by a lot of factors. But clearly a key ingredient to achieving it is listening to your customers and analyzing trends.
Customers are continually voicing their opinions, letting you know what they think and want: online and through regular channels like email, chat, and phone. There’s also social media. Now, with KANA SEM, you can make sure you hear them, and that they hear you—in one clear and consistent voice across all customer touch points. KANA’s listening solution, using advanced text-analytics built specifically to handle natural language and internet speak, automates the nearly impossible task of really listening—to all your customers, all the time. By uncovering the topics, meaning, and sentiment in customer conversations, you can accurately spot problems and trends, determine causality, and report actionable insights from the deluge of customer communications and social media chatter.
In this ‘age of the customer’, to respond to your customers’ needs, you have to know what they want. So listen to them. It’s the only way to stay relevant.
You don’t want to be the next ‘Singer’.
(Vikas Nehru is VP, Product Marketing, KANA)