Okay okay… Harsh title.
I do care what my employees think, but if you’e worked for me you know I never want to discount customer language.
There are two golden rules in business when it comes to customer success.
Rule 1 - The customer is always right
Rule 2 - Refer to rule 1 :)
I know that might be exaggerative, but hear me out.
This week I was reading exit surveys at one of my portfolio companies and noticed a few weren't written by the customer.
A staff member had the cancellation conversation, then filled out the form on the customer's behalf, summarizing what she said. It was done for good reasons. Timeliness, mostly. Get the record in the system, move on.
I pushed back anyway, and not because I want to hold a form over anyone's head before we let them cancel. I would much rather a customer fill the whole thing out herself than have us summarize the conversation for them. The moment we write it down for them, we lose their language. And their language is the product.
But there's a subtler problem underneath, and it's the one I really wanted the team to hear. When we summarize a customer’s, we choose the story that the rest of the company hears.
Nobody writes a summary that indicts their own decisions. We soften the criticism, round the edges, file it under something we already believed. We put in our notes, move on, and tell ourselves a version of events we're subconsciously okay with. That's not dishonesty. It's just what summaries do.
Customer words take the bias out. You're not interpreting anymore. You're going to the customer and listening to what they actually have to say, good or bad, in the words they chose when nobody was smoothing it over. To be fair, when I raised this, the team showed me most of the surveys were filled out by customers themselves. The sloppy ones were a handful.
But a handful is how it starts.
Nobody decides to stop listening to customers. They let summaries stand in for sentences, one timeliness decision at a time.
And that's the larger picture. The cancellation form is one example. Ask yourself how often your customer's actual language reaches your leadership team.
Not the support ticket categories, not the Fathom AI recordings, not the survey averages, not your account manager's recap.
The sentences. The actual words of your customers.
For most companies the honest answer is almost never, to which I would then say the actual answer is “never”.
Everything a leadership team reads about its customers has passed through two or three summaries before it hits the table, and every pass strips a little more truth.
Listen in Their Words
The customer writes it. Cancellation forms, feedback, complaints. Staff can add context underneath. They never replace the customer's words.
Read the raw sentences monthly. The categorized chart is for the board deck. The verbatims are for the fix. Put them in front of the leadership team unedited.
Quote the customer, not the paraphrase. When a decision is justified by customer feedback, the customer's actual sentence should be in the room. If nobody can produce it, you're deciding off a story someone told themselves.
When in doubt, ask. Why do you spend time wondering what customer’s think? Simply ask. You have your customer’s info… When’s the last time you spoke to them directly?
Get the words. Skip the translation.
