Are You Actively Listening to Your Customers for BIG IDEAS?

Not long ago I was in Southern California where I visited with 42 undergraduate instructors at six different colleges.

If you read my article on The Strategy that Almost Got Me Fired, you know I'm fond of some something I call toll booth questions. These are questions that help capture backstories and details of the customer experience.

One of my toll booth questions on this trip was this:

“Do educational publishers actively listen to you?”

I was a bit surprised that 31 people said NO quite decisively. Only five people said YES, and six wanted some clarification of what “actively listening” really means. (These are academics after all.)

The perception of this small group of instructors (most of them were teaching business, social science, or humanities courses) was that publishers were not actively listening to them.

As for what active listening means in this context … it’s really about how well publishers are capturing the customer experience and backstory, especially pain points. It's also about how well publishers are listening for BIG IDEAS from their customers.

Historically, publishers have "listened" to their markets via surveys, product reviews, focus groups, and one-on-one interviews. Overall, it’s been a functional and symbiotic relationship, one that has enhanced the product development process and yielded some BIG IDEAS that were developed into great new products.

But many people I know who work (or recently worked) at educational publishing companies report that the relationship with their customers has become much more complicated.

That is probably an understatement, and merits a slight detour for a little background.

Just last week I was talking with a friend in the industry who described what's happening at educational publishing houses this way:

"We're watching a train wreck in slow motion."

Another friend who works at one of the BIG educational publishers recently described his company's latest round of "personnel reductions" this way:

"Let's not kid ourselves about what's really happening. We're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."

So what do these analogies have to do with symbiotic relationships and whether or not publishers are actively listening to their customers?

Well, how challenging do you think it is for people on that metaphorical train wreck or a sinking Titanic to actively listen to customers?

Not easy. You might even say "complicated."

Perhaps the 31 professors in California nailed it, but my conversations were by no means a valid sample of the cohort population as a whole. So I decided to launch a ONE THING Survey* to 1,200 undergraduate instructors representing 10 different academic disciplines.

I purposely did not want to ask survey participants if publishers were listening to them. That approach is fine on campus where I can explain what I mean by active listening, but in an online survey it seemed leading, awkward, even harsh.

So I decided to ask them that if they ruled the world WHAT they would like publishers and ed tech companies to do to improve undergraduate education. By combining this with questions about the importance of product reviews and instructor feedback I was able to explore their beliefs and attitudes about how these companies really view and utilize their feedback. In other words, they were telling me how well they thought publishers and ed tech companies were actively listening to them.

And what did we learn?

Over 40% of survey participants believed that publishers place a much higher or somewhat higher value on product reviews and instructor feedback today than they did in the past. Another 40% felt that publishers value product reviews and instructor feedback about the same today as they did in the past.

On the surface this suggests that college instructors perceive that publishers are listening to people in their market spaces, a perception that clearly contradicts the information I gathered during my campus visits in Southern California. But don't leave the room just yet.

I also asked participants to comment on how useful product reviews are at various stages of the product life cycle. The majority of participants reported that feedback is useful at all stages. It’s worthwhile to note that 43% of participants believe that reviews and feedback are extremely useful when testing a new product concept--this was the most common response among all the response choices.

The optional open-ended responses to this question included a number of comments that expressed some degree of doubt about how publishers actually use product reviews. Several participants who responded that product reviews were extremely or very useful expressed doubt about how publishers actually use this feedback.

The tone of many responses were similar to what I heard on my campus visits. One response in particular was fairly representative of at least a third of the comments to this question:

“I almost never hear back from publishers. I have no knowledge of how or if my feedback is being used.” 

Another respondent said this:

“ My experience has been that if you have opinions different than what may be desired, those opinions get dismissed. However, if your opinions are in line with expectations of the publishers, they are happy to hear more and listen to that feedback.”

Here we see a perception of selective listening or more specifically, confirmation bias. Again, about one third of the comments had some measure of this tone present.

Perhaps the most important question in the survey was this:

How Optimistic are you regarding the kind of new product educational publishers will bring to market in the next few years?

While 37% of participants were extremely or very optimistic, 42% were only somewhat optimistic and over 20% were not too optimistic or not at all optimistic.

My personal interpretation: a large percentage of instructors are apprehensive about the future, something that has been confirmed in numerous virtual focus groups and one-on-one interviews that we have conducted over the last couple of years.

Then, of course, there was the if you ruled the world question:

What is ONE THING you would direct educational publishers and ed tech companies to do?

This question allowed for a complete open-ended response, and I must say that I was hoping to catch wind of several BIG IDEAS percolating inside the fertile minds of the participants. Frankly, many of the comments focused on price, revision cycles, and improving the quality and availability of instructor resources, the same things publishers have been hearing for at least 25 years. Been there, heard that.

Now, before anyone dismisses this group of participants as being short on BIG IDEAS, let me reveal a most interesting tidbit. 26 of the participants of this survey emailed me personally to share a BIG IDEA that they were interested in exploring or promoting.

Some of these folks asked me if I could recommend a company that might be interested in their idea. It says a lot that 14% of our survey participants would take the time to communicate with me outside of the survey.

Follow-up conversations with these folks suggest that most of them fall into one of three categories:

1. They are not sure who to share their BIG IDEAS with. (Translation: They don't know who's listening.)
2. They are not comfortable sharing their BIG IDEAS too openly, fearing that they might lose control of or rights to these ideas. (Translation: The wrong people might listen.)
3. They are not sure a publisher will carefully listen to their BIG IDEAS. (Translation: They're not sure the people who used to listen still do.)

So in the end, it really does come back to listening. To be fair, I know several people in the educational publishing and/or learning science business who are excellent listeners, skilled at tapping into the customer experience and capturing backstories. These folks are part of a minority, however.

So the moral of this story is that active listening matters. It is something that every educational publishing, learning science, and ed tech company should do within the market spaces they hope to serve and support with their offerings.

Believe me, those college instructors are out there, and they’ve got feedback, stories ... and some really interesting BIG IDEAS. They want to be heard.

If you'd like to see the complete survey results, you can download my Summary Report HERE.

Hey, thanks for listening.

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DAVID BRAKE is the founder of The Grandview Group and Pubcentral. His companies help organizations and individuals create content and product that connects with customers. He is the coauthor of The Social Media Bible 1/e (Wiley, 2009) that featured a future-thinking chapter titled Everyone's a Publisher, something he truly believes.

ABOUT THE GRANDVIEW GROUP. We help clients get closer to customers, markets, and the future. In the last decade, over 1 million educators, administrators, and students have participated in one of our surveys, product reviews, virtual focus groups, or one-on-one interviews. We also create and curate content for textbooks, online courses, and other content-rich education and training products. What can we do for you? It all begins with a quick conversation and a few questions.

* ONE THING Surveys have only five or six questions and are written in a conversational tone. The goal is to engage participants in a five minute dialogue around one particular topic. The questions I ask are the same questions I would ask if I were making a campus visit or meeting someone at a professional event. The questions give me insights into your world, your story, and your view of the future. Hundreds (sometimes thousands) of responses generally give me the “big picture” where I can see consensus, qualify confusion, and identify potential trends in the higher education space.