Building relationships through digital active listening

There’s been a big emphasis on empathy and listening in the last 18 months; with the enormous shift to digital only events, platforms, and experiences the world has had to relearn how to communicate and interact and the human components can get lost in a scramble to accommodate changing needs and shifting markets. Conversations about how to better serve our audiences and build relationships with our customers are relatively common and have been for the last several years – everyone seems to acknowledge the importance of doing so. What’s sometimes missing are the actionable steps that can take us beyond theory and into the practical.

Each member of an audience is making three judgments about every brand they interact with. These judgements are a gateway into building relationships with visitors and lays out a clear roadmap for building a customer experience based on empathy and trust.

Does the brand:

• ‘get them.’
• truly understand what they want.
• clearly show that understanding through the products and services being offered.

Building relationships is an essential component of the modern digital experience, especially as audiences continue to move beyond the pure transactional and toward the mutually beneficial. To better understand and engage with people, we must be truly interested and invested in where they are coming from – that means paying even more attention than we have been to recognizing their emotions and taking the time to validate their experiences. It’s a situation for which ‘active listening’ is ideal because it means taking the time to think about and process not only the words that are being said but the overall message that the customer is trying to convey.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that two factors are likely to make people reach out to brands – they’re either extremely happy, or extremely unhappy. The trouble with that accepted wisdom is that it ignores a great many factors that are directly within the control of the brands in question. Are we, as marketers, waiting for people to reach out to us? Or are we engaging with people on the channels where they spend time? Are we encouraging our audience to reach out, to chat with us, to share thoughts, impressions, and feedback? Are we accessible? Are we interactive? Most of these steps require a commitment to community; they mean investing in the time and the resources that are required to hear and understand the audience that we’re trying to reach.

That means paying careful attention throughout the customer lifecycle, establishing goals that track progress and measure success across the customer funnel, and making sure that the approach to those goals is SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-bound). The key is?listening to and learning from the results – going to all this effort if you don’t intend to socialize and consider the feedback doesn’t make much sense. People want to know that they’re being heard and understood, that the critical information they are trying to convey is being received. Creating a system that accomplishes these goals means building digital active listening into the culture of the brand and committing to action that reflects the results.?

Bryant H. McGill said that “one of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say.” We have the chance to learn from and engage with our audiences in critical ways, building relationships and improving our systems, products, and cultures by moving a commonly understood real-world concept into the digital space. Digital active listening is an incredible way to be both attentive and responsive while simultaneously working to understand and incorporate all insights the audience shares with us.