It all comes down to money, doesn't it? Trying to wring as much productivity and efficiency out of the customer support desk to save money.

This pretty much precludes listening to your customers; your agents barely have time to prematurely decide what the problem is, state the solution, and get off the phone ASAP. Who cares how the customer feels, you're saving money. You're doing a great job!

Hopefully enough money will be saved to keep the business going because there won't be much new money coming in if all the customers leave.

How does this happen? Because metrics, efficiency, productivity, keeping staffing levels low, etc. are the only thngs being paid attention to. After awhile, the organization  starts to get tunnel vision and begins to believe the customer service desk is the sum total of how many calls it can answer in an hour.

Or this: we have all had the scenario where the support desk was more intent on trying to make us understand the company policy than listening to what our  real issue was and trying to fix it. Customers don't care about policy, they want their problems solved. This means the company has to listen and make certain it understands the problem completely instead of trying to make the customer fit into what the company thinks is the problem or browbeating the customer with company policy that says whatever the customer wants can't be done.

How can the company turn itself around? By turning the improvement efforts from  inside-out to outside-in. Rather than measure things that have little to do with keeping the customer happy and coming back, you need to listen to how the customer thinks you are doing. Then improvements that mean something can be made.

This feedback needs to be shared across the organization, not kept only for customer support to see. Otherwise a very fractured view of the customer experience is created, causing a huge resource drain and decreasing customer satisfaction.

Takeaways 

Listening to customers helps you understand how to help them better.

It also improves your relationship with your customers; it shows you care about their opinion.

Like everyone else, customers want to be heard.