I came across another article on customer-centric thinking today on Click Z by Heidi Cohen. Cohen relates a story of planning her summer vacation online, making reservations, and then canceling after reading a bad review. She later received an email asking for more feedback about the cancellation. This causes Heidi to wax eloquent about how small hotel managers are very sensitive to online ratings and work hard to listen to customer needs so they can make sure their customers enjoy the service.

The rest of the article lays out a few tips for listening to customers, gathering information and applying it. I appreciate this current focus on customer centrism and usually try to follow what people are saying about it. The trend toward customers seems like a good thing.

Especially if is for real.

Listening is an art. If I listen to a customer just to figure out a plan for the best way to manipulate them to purchase my goods, I may not listen for long. Or they may not speak for long.

Granted most of us listen to other people for selfish reasons. It is hard to listen for the sake of listening. This is challenge of turning and facing another person in all their ambiguity; valuing them as unique person; and listening to what they say (without immediately figuring out how to use or retort it). Our culture has little time or capacity for really listening, but if we learned it, it might change our lives.

Can this kind of listening work in business? It depends on the business model. Does the business exist for pure profit? Or are there other reasons? Under some models, a company might be willing to lose some profit if it means listening and responding to some genuine customer concerns. Then this stuff becomes real.

Otherwise it is just a means to end. Another method to ultimately use another for our own ends. If we practice this in business, I’m not sure we can turn it off when we go home.

I have a silly idea (maybe its purely eschatalogical), but I believe there could be another kind of commerce. Commerce is good because it involves exchange, thus presupposing relationship at some level. So could there be a commerce of love? And could it happen on this planet in this age?

I guess this why I’m a bad blogger. Too much writing and not enough linking! So I’ll stop.