Addressing Organizational Listening Challenges and Opportunities: Some Best Practices and Potential Solutions

This chapter returns to the Digital Era case study, introducing some best practices and potential solutions to the most common organizational listening obstacles identified earlier in the book. We attempt to demonstrate how creating a pan-organizational steering team can strengthen the foundation of an organizational listening program, and how CX roadmapping makes it possible to connect intelligence derived from listening to customers or other external stakeholders to people, processes, and activities within the organization itself. We attempt to show how convergence mapping and other data blending methods can make all external stakeholder data “work together” to pinpoint and support priorities for organizational planning and improvement. We also introduce and illustrate a ten-step process for using intelligence gained via listening to customers and other external stakeholders to drive systemic improvement. We conclude with a call to action, urging organizations to embrace and integrate the preceding best practices/potential solutions into their respective approaches to listening and responding to external stakeholders.