Last week, with our nanny out on bereavement leave, I picked my children up from school in the afternoons each day. Adjacent to the school are paved basketball courts, where many of the kids congregate to play before heading home.

Since my nine-year-old son enjoys riding his Ripstick on the courts, I melted into the shadows of the trees on the hill overlooking the playground, and simply observed. What I saw was fascinating and informative.

I had observed these kids, on literally hundreds of occasions over the years as their soccer coach and in social settings with their parents. Seeing the kids in a playground setting, however, without them knowing I was there, was completely different. This was a much more organic view. In many ways it was akin to understanding the true voice of a customer.

I saw alliances between kids that I had no idea hung out together. I saw kids who were otherwise very confident and capable on the soccer field being teased relentlessly for their inability to catch a football. Those doing the teasing were apparently more ‘popular’ socially, but less capable soccer players. And this fact explained a great deal to me about the dynamics I’d been witnessing at soccer practice.

I observed kids who had never been anything but polite and respectful to me, purposefully running into other kids on skateboards with their bikes. It shed light on why my son’s friendship with that kid had taken a bad turn the prior year.

Then it hit me. This was the voice of the customer! It was playing out right before my eyes! For five years, my wife and I had been asking our son about school and his friendships every night at the dinner table. “Fine” is about all we got. For two years, I’d been trying to figure out why a kid on the soccer team will pass to some teammates and not to others. I didn’t get it. Now, after twenty minutes at the playground, I was getting it! I was getting it all, and I didn’t even have to ask.

The parallels to the business world are obvious:

1. Go beyond direct interaction with your customers

Surveying your customers directly, either through online surveys, face-to-face discussions or phone interviews can be misleading. Oftentimes your customers won’t or can’t tell you how they really feel. A direct dialogue with your customers is extremely important and should be embraced, but you need to go further.

Observe playground behavior! Gather unsolicited reviews about your products and services online, read what your customers are saying about you within social media postings. Hire an outside firm to have conversations with customers for you. Executives and board members are often amazed by what their customers will tell an outside firm vs. what they will tell representatives from their own company.

2.  Understand the nuances of customer needs and behavior

When interpreting the voice of your customers, take time to understand the meaning behind the words. Oftentimes, a customer will express an opinion in terms that don’t really speak to the heart of the issue. They might wax on about the ‘multi-platform installer.’ Your first inclination might be to tout your cross platform support. By asking the second and third-level questions, however, you might discover that it’s really the ease of installation they love, not the number of platforms supported.

In the playground example above, a child might be well behaved at all times, except when they get paired up with on particular kid. Who is that kid? What’s the story behind the story that drives your customers’ behavior? What’s the meaning behind the words?

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