What helping 1,000+ organizations taught this nonprofit leader about customer listening

Plenty of organizations encourage leaders to listen to their customers. Listen4Good teaches them how to make listening part of how they operate. 

Through coaching, proven feedback frameworks, and technology powered by SurveyMonkey, the nonprofit has helped more than 1,200 organizations build continuous feedback systems that strengthen trust, improve programs, and drive better decisions.

If anyone knows the power of customer listening, it's Valerie Threlfall. As founder and executive director of Listen4Good, she's helped organizations replace assumptions with feedback, and seen firsthand that the biggest breakthroughs often come from asking customers one simple question.

She joined us this year at our annual flagship event, CuriosityCon, to discuss why continuous customer listening is one of the biggest drivers of loyalty, retention, and growth.

Watch their full conversation

Here are four lessons on what happens when organizations use continuous customer feedback.

Most organizations track metrics: conversion rates, churn, feature usage. But they rarely ask: "Why are customers actually making these choices?"

Listen4Good worked with a job training organization facing a churn problem. They were scaling fast, but 10-20% of participants were dropping out. The leadership team had all the usual hypotheses—maybe people weren't motivated enough, maybe the program was too hard, maybe they found other jobs.

Then the CEO asked a question that changed everything: "But what if we're wrong?"

So they asked the participants directly and what came back was simple but profound. The organization only paid participants when they hit milestones several weeks into the program. For some, there was too much financial uncertainty, leading to drop outs for something more stable. 

The fix? The organization changed the payment structure to hit sooner for participants. Within weeks, retention skyrocketed.

"If they hadn't asked," Threlfall said, "they wouldn't know."

Takeaway: Your customers see friction points in your experience that your data can't reveal. One conversation with the right person can unlock the insight that transforms retention and loyalty.

Try this: Customer feedback templates to use across the customer journey

A lot of companies gather customer feedback, file it away, and... nothing changes. 

Threlfall's advice is simple: start small, but start intentionally. Pick a real problem affecting your customers and identify the people who could do their jobs better with these insights. Run a small feedback effort and then close the loop.

"Make sure you're actually going to do something with this data," Threlfall emphasized. "If you're going to ask for feedback, make sure you're actually making different decisions."

That means telling customers what you heard, what you changed, and why. It's the difference between a one-off survey and implementing continuous listening where customers know their voice matters.

Takeaway: Customer feedback programs fail because companies ask but don't act. Reverse that: start small, make one concrete change based on what customers tell you, and share that change publicly.

Try this: Set up always-on customer listening with Programs.

Running a one-off survey to your customers is helpful. Building customer feedback into how your organization operates is transformational.

Threlfall talks about moving from ad-hoc feedback efforts to systematizing customer listening: embedding it in team roles, connecting it to KPIs, and making it part of how decisions get made. It's aligning people and processes so that understanding customers becomes just "how we work here."

Without that structure, teams revert to what's fastest and most familiar and can allow customer insights to get deprioritized. 

Takeaway: The teams building customer loyalty and retention and are the ones who have customer listening built into performance metrics, job responsibilities, and decision-making frameworks. This ensures customer feedback is prioritized across your business. 

Try this: Integrate survey responses with Salesforce, Tableau and HubSpot

Listen4Good believes that how you decide to gather feedback is not just up to the people sitting in a boardroom. It's about diversifying whose voice gets heard, who shapes how you interpret feedback, and which customers' experiences get centered.

Threlfall describes inclusive listening as participatory from the start to build feedback equity. For example, they utilize more junior staff members, who maybe have not had a strong stake in decision-making typically, and community members and clients to directly shape and interpret feedback. 

Another tip from Threlfall: disaggregate your data and see which segments or groups are thriving and which are not as happy. Then you center the voices of customers who are most likely to churn or leave, even if they're a small part of your base.

"It's really diversifying whose voices are at the table," Threlfall said. "That's what separates companies that truly understand their customers from ones that just think they do."

Takeaway: Real customer listening shifts focus to the people you're most at risk of losing. That means bringing in frontline support teams, talking to customers who are leaving, and centering experiences you might otherwise miss.

Try this: NPS and Brand Loyalty Survey Template

Whether you're losing customers, dealing with churn, or just wondering why your NPS is flat—the answer usually comes from asking, not analyzing.

Listen4Good has worked with hundreds of organizations. In every case, the moment they started asking customers directly instead of relying on assumptions, the outcomes changed. 

As Lehmann put it: "Nothing gets better until you get curious."

The question isn't whether you have time to listen to customers. It's whether you can afford not to, especially when one conversation can unlock insights that could transform your business.

Learn how SurveyMonkey Programs can help your team build continuous customer feedback into your operations.

Want to hear more from companies and organizations using customer listening to drive growth? Visit CuriosityCon to watch the full session library.