Why Companies Avoid Talking to Customers

I’ve been thinking about the reasons companies can’t or won’t blog and realizing that it’s cultural. Culture, of course in any enterprise starts at the top. It’s driven by the strength or weakness of the de facto leader. Put someone insecure in that corner office, and the entire company will have an insecure approach to their entire work ethic.

Three Rock Solid Answers

So why is it that some companies don’t want to talk to their customers? After mulling on this question for several hours, I keep coming to only three answers to why companies avoid talking to customers.

1. Fear of customers — This is actually part of a vicious cycle. The company won’t talk to the customers to get to know them. So the enterprise cannot predict how the customers will act. The customers become the “great unknown.” Every company fears how the unknown will affect the bottom line, which they, of course, know in detail and track in fear for their jobs.
2. Lack of trust — This sounds the same as first, but it’s slightly different, because it includes the lack of trust within the corporate environment. That means that even those folks who actually understand and talk to the customers have no credibility, because they too cannot be trusted.
3. hubris plain and simple — The enterprise considers customers to be a necessary evil that as a group is barely tolerable. This may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. I know the children’s publisher that doesn’t like children. I’ve worked for too many teachers’ publishers that “teacher proof” their materials.

Oddly enough, in my mind, those are the three main reasons that companies don’t blog, or that when they do blog they fail miserably.

Liz Strauss

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