In recent months, we have been involved in initiatives to better listen to customers, understand their needs, expectations, and preferences. All of this, of course, with the aim of satisfying them more, retaining them, and developing their loyalty. We have also undertaken the same type of exercise for ourselves. From these projects, we have drawn several interesting observations.
Very often, we think we lack information about our customers.
We consider significant initiatives, contemplate, and analyze platforms to develop the knowledge that will allow us to better reach our customers.
Often, we have much more information than we think.
Every organization we have met to date has a gold mine of information on its current or future customers that would allow it to significantly improve its relationship with them:
– Survey comments
– Studies conducted by specialized firms
– Teams in constant communication with customers
– Customer comments on social media
– Closed complaints
The list is long.
Why don’t we see what is right in front of us?
Yet, we are rational beings. And we are all committed to improving our customers’ satisfaction and growing our revenues. So how is it possible that we do not see what is right in front of us? A restructuring of our perception of our knowledge is necessary to sift through our thoughts.
This is where the concept of the “Organizational Johari Window” comes into play.
It distinguishes 4 quadrants or zones in our perceptions of reality:
1. What everyone knows about our company – The open area
2. What we, the leaders, and employees, know about the company, which is hidden from outsiders – The hidden area
3. What our customers know (and often our partners too) that we do not see – The blind spot
4. What is hidden from everyone – The unknown area
The Open Area
This area concerns what customers know about the organization and what we also know: our vision, our products and services, our distribution network are usually part of it. The larger this area is, the more authentic the relationship with the customers is, and ideally, we would seek to extend it as much as possible.
The Hidden Area
The hidden area is everything the organization keeps to itself and does not communicate to its customers, either consciously or unconsciously.
This includes the real history of the organization, its internal culture, its secrets, but also its hidden strengths and talents. It is an invaluable source of growth for the organization. To start tapping into it, it often takes the arrival of new people who will look at the organization with fresh and external eyes.
The Blind Spot
What our customers and those external to the organization know or perceive, and that we seem not to see, is our blind spot. Here lies the gold mine of customer comments that we often no longer see. It’s not really hidden. It’s just that we don’t see it. Our job, as a leader or as a partner of these leaders, is then to unveil this blind spot – with kindness, but without complacency.
There are often pleasant surprises when we discover that our customers love certain aspects of our services that we had not realized, for example. There are also less pleasant surprises, where we realize that we are not as good as we thought. It’s not uncommon to say that we knew it. There are certain things that are sometimes easier not to look at; we are human after all.
The Unknown Area
The last zone is the privileged area of projects that aim to better listen to customers, to discover their needs, their expectations, and their preferences. The concept of the unknown area applies wonderfully here, because, as is often the case, customers do not always know what they want. We all remember the famous quote from Ford (“If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”) or even Steve Jobs’s attitude that customers don’t yet know what they will want tomorrow.
The needs, the desires, they do exist and are present. As customers, we are just not conscious of them and they are not actualized with the existing or forthcoming technology, whose possibilities we sometimes ignore. The work then consists of identifying these needs and desires, often at higher levels of abstraction. This requires doing things differently. The best example concerns focus groups whose inability to grasp what customers really want has been commented on many times.
Conclusion: Listening to Customers, a Change Project
Listening to customers is above all a change project, in which we come to modify our perceptions that:
– We already meet all their needs,
– We know what they want (sometimes better than they do),
– We must make significant changes to reach them,
– etc.

To accompany in the change, let’s take the time to appreciate the involved phases.
This change in perceptions must be managed: it is an imbalance that makes us vulnerable as leaders and can bring us many emotions: denial, shock, anger, guilt… Let’s say we go through all the stages of change!
This is the great value of this concept of the Johari Window applied in the context of customer relations: it highlights the real challenges of these initiatives; and as often, they are primarily human.
As when the concept is applied at the individual level, expanding the “open area” requires effort. These efforts are not about searching for information and tools, but rather about the openness we give ourselves to see the world differently, with the eyes of our customers. It’s work that requires determination, courage, and a lot of kindness towards oneself.
By Guillaume Delroeux
Guillaume is president and leader of customer experience practices at Prométhée consultants and helps organizations with customer relationship centres make the most of their technologies to maximize their impact and create legendary customer experiences.