Loud voices vs. important ones

Broken systems get worse when we confuse the loud voices with the important ones.

Spend a lot of time listening to the loudest complaints and you will elevate those voices to importance, because you’re no longer carefully listening to the more easily overlooked constituents.

A persistent typist with a keyboard might be a cranky critic, but is this the person you set out to serve?

If an airline makes 84% of its profit on leisure travelers, it’s not clear that the person who flies once a year on a last-minute first class fare is the person they ought to be paying the most attention to.

We can acknowledge that someone is upset, we can see them, respect them and help them. But we shouldn’t get confused that there’s a correlation between their ALL CAPS EFFORT AT ATTENTION and our agenda to serve the people we seek to serve.

This is a piece by Seth Godin and first appeared on his blog here