Listening to Customers

While most practitioners are familiar with traditional customer satisfaction surveys, research findings suggest that best practice companies use multiple tools to bring the voice of the customer inside the organization. The purpose of this study is to examine how best practice companies use various tools to listen to customers. The primary contribution of this article is in discussing a variety of different customer listening tools used by practitioners, along with introducing new customer listening tools to the literature. Furthermore, this article puts forth a framework that captures essential characteristics of each tool, depicting when their use is most appropriate. Finally, this article depicts how customer listening tools are linked together and synthesized into a customer performance model.