Book Review
Savvy business leaders know that the "customer is king”, that’s according to Karen Mangia, author of the new book Listen Up!: How to Tune In to Customers and Turn Down the Noise. The voice of the customer is what matters most in critical business decisions. How are you responding to customer concerns? Your answer is crucial to the growth of your business and your revenues. But are businesses really listening to their customers?
Thriving businesses understand that listening is the first step in leadership. Listen Up! by author, customer experience expert and Salesforce executive, Karen Mangia, offers busy business leaders a playbook for building a culture that is grounded in creating customer experiences that deliver customer success. Karen shows you how to leverage better questions to get better answers, with strategies that go beyond the survey. More meetings aren't the answer: better metrics and better results are closer than you might think. But only when you are listening to your customers across the entire lifecycle of the journey.
Designed as a practical guide, Listen Up! is filled with the proven best practices, strategies, and techniques to move business owners from deep listening to deep understanding, from powerful statistics to powerful stories. And don't forget the cautionary tales, designed to provoke your business into greater performance. For every customer-focused business, there's always an opportunity to go deeper, to discover more, and to serve at a deeper level. This book shows you how, with best practices from internationally-renowned B2B and B2C brands that have transformed their approach to customer success.
Karen also includes hands-on exercises you can use, today, to reshape how you interact with your customers. Rethink how teams work together, with guidance on how to truly align around the one voice that matters most: the voice of the customer. Do you know how to engage in a dialogue that lets your customers feel heard, listened to, and understood? Can your leadership team take ego out of the conversation so that you can hear what needs to be said? This book will show you how to listen without defensiveness. Welcome to your road map to a deeper understanding of what it really takes to do what your competition won't, or can't. Ultimately, Listen Up! is about the most important connection in any business: the connection to the customer.
Author quotes
In the Age of the Customer, every enterprise must re-engineer its processes to be ‘customer first’.
Marketing is no longer about what we say. Instead, it begins with what we hear. Then it must translate what we hear into what we do. That, in turn, will ultimately translate into what other people say about us.
We have to show that we are listening, that we do care, and that we can respond. And that means we have to listen up!
About the author
Karen Mangia is Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce. Dedicated to employee success across all organizations, she serves on the company’s Work from Home Taskforce and on the Racial Equality and Justice Taskforce. A prolific writer and keynote speaker, she is also the author of Success With Less (2016) and Working from Home (2020). She is a TEDx speaker, a trained chef and a recipient of multiple awards, including 40 under 40 and the Distinguished Alumni Award from her alma mater, Ball State University. Her writing regularly appears on Thrive Global, ZDNet and various other national media outlets.
Why LoA loves it….
They say that if you want to make more sales, you have to get into the headspace of your customer. So what better way to do that than to actually start listening - really listening to those customers. In her new book, Karen really gets to the crux of the challenge for so many businesses, and encourages a new way of approaching customer relationship building. She understands the power of building customer experiences that are based on actually delivering what customers want and need. It’s about being open to really hearing those customers speak, responding to their feedback, and creating products and services that deliver to those needs. This is a book for any entrepreneur who is really committed to taking their customer relationship building to the next level. — Melanie Hawken, founder & ceo of Lionesses of Africa