Executives: Why You Should Prioritize Spending 1:1 Time with Customers

I’ll make a suggestion. It might sound obvious, then preposterous, then provocative.

Obvious because of course, we all understand customer-centricity is a prerequisite to success in business. Preposterous because executives’ time is incredibly limited and the kind of approach I’m suggesting is far from the most time-efficient way to ingest customer data. And provocative because nonetheless, I’ll argue investing a meaningful amount of time, say 2-5% annually, personally sitting in one-on-one conversations with your customers has the potential to impact every decision you make, everything you communicate to your organization, the opportunity to influence the behavior of your team, their culture, their ways of thinking and generating value. 

Let me back up. At Bridge Partners this summer, we up-leveled our Voice of the Customer (VoC) initiative aimed at capturing the sentiments of our customers and translating them into insights to inform our business strategy. After stepping into my role as Chief Growth Officer last year, I felt it was critical for me to personally immerse myself in our customers’ world, despite the many available sources of customer information, from market reports to third-party research to our internal data to our many beloved anecdotes. 

McKinsey reports that companies that excel in customer experience, consistently linking customer feedback directly to business strategy, often see more than double the revenue growth of their peers​. PwC’s research shows companies delivering exceptional customer experiences can deliver up to a 16% price premium on their products and services. This premium reflects the tangible value that customers place on feeling heard and valued, which VoC programs can facilitate.

Best-in-class marketing organizations design robust VoC programs that bring together numerous sources of customer information, triangulate market research, first-party data, and direct feedback to generate insights that can be operationalized across go to market levers.  And the best in the industry do it consistently, at scale, in real time. 

Isn’t that challenging enough? Should executives really take it further and prioritize the time? Why not build the right processes and trust teams to execute? 

What if you invested a mere 2% of your time—call it 40 hours a year—to build a visceral, intuitive, emotional understanding of your customers? How might that understanding affect your daily work? Imagine approaching every interaction every day with a new, empathetic lens that enables you to see your business through your customers’ eyes. Now imagine your whole leadership team did the same. Might that investment of 2% of your time transform, in profound ways, the other 98? 

When I personally started the process of sitting down for an hour a week with individual customers in one-on-one conversation, I already felt I had a pretty good understanding of them. We have all the tools, from market research to CRM data, and the predisposition of our consultant community is to adopt a customer-first view of the business.  

But here’s the gold.  As an executive, you are in search of reality vs. just sifting through customer listening mechanisms, aggregates, and segments.  And there’s a difference between improving your product and marketing motions with customer data and the transformational culture-building leaders can accomplish with multilayered customer insight to drive strategic decisions. 

As I got started, I quickly learned that the types of questions I felt compelled to ask our customers, and the way I listened to the responses, unlocked different kinds of understanding than we garner through surveys and other conventional research mechanisms.  

Meeting with customers one-on-one and connecting personally allowed me to dig deeper, uncovering insights that might have otherwise remained obscured. Getting started can be a little intimidating, so I’ll share a few tips here that I’ve learned after conducting dozens interviews. If you reach out I’ll be happy to connect with you to share more ideas and hear yours.

How to Spark High-Value Customer Conversations

There are several key strategies that can significantly impact the success of your engagement.

Make it about them, not you:

Focus on their world and understanding them, not on communicating anything to them.  

Make it personal. Start with their view of the industry, their company, their job—and then move to their career journeys, their wisdom, their values and beliefs, what they’ve learned and what they aspire to. Alternate between open questions that invite exploration and asking for anecdotes that dive deeper into specific themes. 

For example:

• What do you think are the personal qualities that have most contributed to your successes?
• Which of your past experiences did the most to prepare you for your current role?
• What do you find most rewarding about your current role?
• What do you think is the most valuable thing you’re learning?
  

Listen actively and seek the “because”:

Follow-up questions are crucial to get more detail and clarification, but even more so to uncover the surprise topics that yield the richest insights. Ask “why” a lot. Listen for the words that have energy or emotion behind them and invite them to “Say a little more about _____.”  

Great follow-up questions do more than ask for detail. They invite exploration and search for meaning:

• What was most valuable about that?
• Why was that important?
• Did anything about that experience surprise you?
  

Share the insights to cement the learning:

In my experience, the most valuable learning from time spent with customers is hearing about experiences and hearing facts. There are certainly specific insights and broad themes that directly impact activities in the moment but they’re also building a new, multi-layered lens through which I’m beginning to see our industry, our business, and our strategy differently. 

The reporting and sharing is crucial—in two ways:

1. It forces reflection, which is the driver of real learning. The process of thinking through and capturing the learning coming from my conversations, connecting the dots across conversations, is where I really discover the insights that matter. Without taking the time to reflect, I simply wouldn’t learn as effectively.
2. It sparks new kinds of conversations in the organization. Reporting can easily go into a vacuum or be mechanically ingested. Focus on provocation! Treat reports and insights as the beginning of discussions and debate, not as prescriptions for quick fixes but as questions that offer new ways to grapple with the fundamentals of the business. 

Don’t Forget to Say Thanks

Customers willing to spend time with you are precious. They care. They want to be heard. So, and this might sound obvious but requires clear intention, treat them kindly. Say thanks, but more importantly, engage with them in a way that communicates your curiosity and the way you value their time. 

They’re dedicating their time to providing insights for you, is there something you can share in return? Can you offer them a first look at the trends and observations you’ve gathered from the broader feedback? An introduction to another customer or industry leader? Perhaps, a first look at or use of a new service based on their input? A token of thanks goes a long way—but the most powerful expression of your appreciation is to be fully present and demonstrate you care what they have to say. 

A Holistic Approach to Customer Insight

We know customer-centricity drives measurable revenue growth, but the conversations I’m having also build foundational understanding and a connection that helps clarify our strategic plans and clarify your moment of relevance.  Can something as simple as a few customer conversations a month fundamentally transform your perspective on your business, embedding your customers’ reality in your biggest decisions and day-to-day interaction with your team?  

Roughly 40 hours a year, less than one meeting a week. It sounds easy, and in a way, it is, but it also takes consistent discipline. The payoff is profound: A steady drip of insight to keep your perspective grounded in the world of the customer. I encourage you to give it a try.