An in-depth knowledge or a well cultivated insight of your customers’ mindset and thought process sure will help you come up with excellent great products and also provide quality services. Conversely, in case of a complete mismatch between their overall aspirations and your offerings, the business model might fail to click. Here are more reasons why all companies irrespective of their size and domain must carefully listen to their customers.

Let us understand the fact that becoming customer-centric effectively means looking at your business model from the ‘outside-in’ view instead of the ‘inside out’ approach. The process does involve a fair understanding the specific problems people might encounter in their daily lives and providing a set of practical solutions. For this, you must grasp their exact needs in order to be able to bridge the gap existing between demand and supply. Also, keep in the mind the following aspects.

• Tapping the boundless power of an array of market opportunities has well become possible thanks to powerful digital media. Technology allows smaller companies to easily reach out to their customers keeping aside impeding geographical and budget barriers. These are no more the constraints to identify and explore new lucrative business opportunities.
• When a team of researchers at Xerox came up with the idea of a commercial printer carrying two engines, it had a fixedn idea of what the company’s customers would want. However, they realized their fault later after talking to many of them at the designing stage itself. So what holds the key is to align your services with the customer needs. Evaluate everything that your business has on offer through their lens in order to realize what the customers like or prefer and whether they are seeking any improvement in existing services?
• Once you have carefully worked on their ideas, it will let you discover something more significant . Additionally, this is a great learning experience for marketers following about the customers’ mindset, which will prove highly beneficial in long run. To deal with their complaints and grievances is another apparent reason why you would want to listen to their customers.
• Talk to your senior employees, ground-level colleagues, or certain core customer groups to frame a set of questions and  elicit the most revealing answers.  When you listen to your prospects, you can gather vital competitive intelligence. You must show willingness to follow how they are responding. Accordingly you can fine-tune your own product development and distribution policy.
• Most firms today carry a proper perspectives on what they can develop and where/ how  they can distribute it. However, they suffer at times owing to poor idea of customers’ aspirations. It is vital to understand trends and evolving consumer psyche. Leading companies like Google,Procter & Gamble etc run initiatives, seeking participation of users/customers to understand their inclinations, habits and their preferences.