In the world of customer service improvement, we talk about the need to ask questions and listen. Let the customer tell us what they want. And we should do this.  But helping customers get what they want takes more. We need to be their coach.

Our customers can and should tell us where they want to go. But we need to help them find the best way to get there. That’s where our skills come into play. (If they already knew the best way, they wouldn’t need us.)

One of the biggest challenges any business organization faces is knowing what their customers want. It’s arguably the most important, most difficult and yet most ignored information in our organizations.

It’s important because we cannot give our customers what they want (or how they want it) if we don’t know. And guessing doesn’t count. Yet the reason customers come to us (and give us money) is to get something. They need our help in the form of a product or service. Fail to give them what they want and they’ll disappear faster than a light snow in July.

In my work, I spend a fair amount of time helping people bring change to their companies. That’s what improving customer service is all about. The companies that make a substantial and permanent improvement in how they serve their customers have discovered how to change their organizations.

Seth Godin has some useful things to say about this. Here’s a great example  from his latest book, Tribes: