“Do your customers agree with what you are proposing?” was one of the questions our Board asked me this week.

My response went something like this:

“I don’t know. We’ve listened to what they have told us. We’ve observed how they find things difficult to use. And then we’ve tried to create something they will like better”

I had just admitted that we’d come up with a proposition based upon what we thought customers would like rather than what they said they actually wanted.

Only a few years ago – saying that you ignored what customers said they wanted could have seen you tried as a Witch. A Heretic.

“He said what? Customers don’t always have the answers? Clearly we have before us a man of unsound mind.”

Fact is – listening to customers can lead to you delivering more of the same. Rather than creating something different.

The darkest days of the Audit Commission, and the dreaded Key Lines of Enquiry, nearly killed any innovation in the sector in which I work.

Hours were spent justifying how customers had played a part in every level of decision making.

Days on end were spent filling in a 50 page Gap Analysis, and poring over a 150 page booklet on supposed Best Practice.

Centuries from now our descendants will study the indecipherable jargon in these papers, imagining them to hold untold secrets of life in the early 21^st Century.

In reality it will tell them nothing – except we were all a bit stupid really.

I remember one of my colleagues literally locking themselves away in an office for 8 hours – desperately writing a 40 page continuous improvement action plan. That’s the UK Housing equivalent of waterboarding .

Equally ridiculous was a conversation I once had with a housing “expert” :

Expert: Why have you chosen not to compare your performance to other housing providers?

Me: Well – very few of our tenants have experienced services from another housing association. So its better we compare our performance with other companies they might use – like Sky or Tesco.

Expert: And your customers told you they wanted this done?

Me: Well, not directly.

Expert: Then you don’t really act on what customers have said at all. And there is no clear link back to your strategic plan. I can’t see that this activity is planned or that a proper risk assessment has taken place.

Me: Oh, just [expletives deleted]…… (NB: this bit appeared as a thought rather than in the conversation itself)

Customers don’t always know what they want. They sometimes need to be shown a better alternative to what they currently have.

Technology and Social media gives us previously unimaginable opportunities to collaborate with customers in the gestation of these alternatives.

So let’s use the new tools we now have.

Let us be bold and use it to make changes for the people we let down by wasting time and money.

Let us move on from the people who told us we had to serve up more of the same. That we had to document, action plan and risk assess every idea we had.

But let us not forget.

It was a dark period in our history.

We must never let it happen again. Our customers deserve much better.