Echoes of the democratic deficit

I have been with iPerceptions for one week, and already I can see that there is a very refreshing ethos at work here.

It's not just the fact that the entire staff has been so welcoming and genuinely affable to this new guy, but rather, that everyone in this company is wholeheartedly committed to acting as a conduit for the voice of the customer, democratizing the customer feedback process as they go.

There is a topic in contemporary Canadian political theory called the "democratic deficit," and it deals with the disconnect between the electorate and the governed. Echoes of this deficit can be heard in the corporate world. Before I came to iPerceptions, I had some exposure to how customer feedback analysis is usually done. You know, the standard tools employed by the political spindoctors and corporate marketers: the focus group, the telephone survey, etc. The deployment of these kinds of customer response measurement tools is symptomatic of a management culture that is bent on dictating the terms of response to the customer; thankfully, it is obsolescent. The way to go is to liberate the voice of the customer and to let it build up as a continuous groundswell that is both actionable and impossible to ignore.

After all, when the prospective buyer and the willing seller meet in the marketplace, there is a kind of moral compact in play. There is an unstated, but implicitly acknowledged, agreement, which sounds something like: "I will give you what you want, only you must tell me what you need." Although this concept may be foreign to many companies (and to most, if not all, levels of government), finding out and meeting the needs of a customer is not a matter of fitting a square peg into a round whole; instead, it is a process of constantly being attuned to the shape of the peg, so that you can reshape the whole to an appropriate size. Sometimes, change might come in the form of a sudden, fashion-driven variation in the mood of the customer base; other times, it might come in the recrudescence of old needs, which were thought to be dead. Either way, it's about keeping an ear to the ground.

Institutions that chose to play deaf do so at their own peril. For companies that value, respect, and respond to the voice of the customer like a sacred dictum, the future is yours.

Yes, I've only been here for one week, but already I can tell that iPerceptions is doing a very noble thing, indeed.