Ernest Hemingway said writers have to have a “built-in, shockproof shit detector.” Business people have to have a similarly reliable machine, for assessing the feedback they get from their customers.
The Professional Speechwriters Association had our big conference last month in D.C., along with our annual Speechwriting School. As always, we sent participants a survey asking for their feedback and promising to use it to make the events better in the future.
As usual, the feedback was mostly positive, the overwhelming attitude for speechwriters being gratitude, for being found in their remote regions of institutions scattered around the world, and lovingly convened. And as always, the speechwriters used their words to offer more colorful critiques than the average customer. Long ago, a speechwriter described the afternoon snack at Speechwriting School to be so scant as to be “almost churlish.” (Our catering is now 100% churl-free.) And this year, a participant in a pre-conference workshop remarked, “This session was intellectually stimulating in much the same way the Blair Witch Project was frightening. Leaving the theatre I wasn’t quite sure what I’d witnessed. The impact settled in later and made it all the more marvelous.”
Over the years, we have used or adapted some of these ideas to make our conferences better. It’s also true that if we followed these suggestions uncritically, it would make the events much worse.
We would not try out speakers with unconventional ideas, or quirky presentation styles. Paradoxically, we would stage suggested sessions that only the suggester would attend—and then would complain it wasn’t exactly what they had in mind! We would choose our speaking lineup for socio-cultural representation first, and crackling ideas and teaching chops second. And in the end, we would offend or bore many of our customers in order to appease a few.
Of course, we make some of those mistakes every year without audience feedback! So what do we really need feedback for?
Obviously, you can’t not ask your customers for feedback. It’s simply arrogant and impolite. But panning for useful advice is like panning for gold. You need a built-in, shockproof sluice box.
A formative thought for me on customer feedback was my first publisher Larry Ragan’s editorial philosophy, on “readership surveys”: It’s not the reader’s job to wake up in the morning knowing what he or she wants to read over breakfast, Larry said and wrote: It’s our job to know. (Old Larry knew how to talk to his customers. On conference days when he wasn’t providing a free lunch, the brochure would say, “Enjoy lunch on your own.”)
Another source of my personal reticence about relying on customer feedback is probably that my first years in business were in an era of American business reform—after Japanese companies had exposed our companies’ complacency. The new watchword was “the customer is always right.” And that was a useful slogan for people working the counter at Hertz. But the better you know your own business—whether it’s nuclear engineering or millinering—the more you know “the customer is always right” is dangerously untrue. That’s how we end up with Three Mile Island, and bad hats.
I recognize that even some experts rely on feedback to constantly reevaluate their work. One of the PSA’s regular faculty members can’t get a gander at the surveys soon enough—and is disappointed when they’re uniformly positive, because they don’t show him how to improve a course he’s been successfully teaching for a decade. Why? He truly loves to teach, and he wants badly to keep getting better at his craft.
Another of our faculty members? Refuses to read or hear any feedback, positive or negative, because he fears it will fuck him up, either way. Presumably, he worries that he’ll get drunk on praise and ham it up in front of the next crowd, to try to draw more of the same. And/or, he’ll be scarred by criticism, like the towering communication guru of the 1990s, his soul forever haunted by some “feedback” he’d received in the 1960s, that he had “big ears and a Napoleon complex.”
I like to hear feedback on new seminars we’re wondering whether we should hold again. And I occasionally feel curious about how an individual session resonated at a tried-and-true event. But the truth is, I’ve been planning conferences for speechwriters and other communicators for about 30 years now. I know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. I agonize over every choice and I know how many tradeoffs I’m having to make. With the blunt instrument of a conference program, I’m trying to achieve five more things than most conference participants know. Beyond just trying to offer helpful ideas, I’m trying to simultaneously entertain perennial participants and welcome new ones. Trying to deal with the political tenor of the times and trying to offer timeless truths. Trying to provoke, trying to soothe; trying to praise, trying to challenge. And yes, trying, in the context of a field that has been mostly white and male, striving to present a proper balance of cultural identity, and thus the variety of perspectives that affords.
I’m trying to give folks what I think they need, whether they know it or not. I do it every day and I’ve done it for most of my career.
And when you’ve given your life to a field of study, and then your heart’s blood to a particular project … my dad’s best friend was the mercurial advertising genius Carl Ally—of, among other campaigns, FedEx’s landmark, “When it absolutely-positively-has-to-be-there-overnight.” Once over dinner at a fancy restaurant in Manhattan, Ally carefully laid out what he thought was a winning proposal for a campaign for a client whose company needed one badly. The client didn’t like it. Ally leaned over and told the guy, “I ought to go to your office and shit in your drawer.”
Bad customer service? Yep. But Ally was trying to give this customer what he needed, not what he wanted. And the customer, in Ally’s mind, was too dumb to see it. So the advertising guru was supposed to feel sheepish?
I’ll keep asking for customer feedback, of course. And if customers keep offering it, I’ll keep reading it. And I’ll keep taking it with a grain of salt. And we’ll all try to keep getting better at what we do, while taking deep pride in our best work, whether everybody likes it, or not.
This article was (choose one):
Entertaining and helpful.
Entertaining but not helpful.
Not entertaining but helpful.
Neither entertaining, nor helpful.
(Do keep in mind that my favorite Onion headline was, “Best Buy’s Employee Suggestion Box Brimming With Urine.”)
