It's counterintuitive to a lot of seasoned professionals, but it's the way to be successful in the digital world. In the phone based environment of most traditional businesses, there is no easy way to track customer input, disseminate it internally, or have an ongoing two way dialogue between customers and the business. In the physical world, customer input quickly becomes viewed as an expense to be managed and minimized, and the only time it is solicited is under very controlled conditions such as focus groups and quantitative market research. Offline, it's the rare organization that encourages input when the costs of interaction are so closely correlated with staffing expense. With email however, the cost of interaction with customers goes down, and the value of interaction with customers goes up, so the decision to encourage input becomes a lot easier.
Customers can now easily engage the company in real conversations.
This has a profound effect on the way customers feel about companies they deal with, as well as on how the voice of the customer makes its way inside the company. The opportunities for relationship building, cost savings, revenue generation and product development to give just a few examples, are enormous. Companies that do not actively encourage real time input from their customers will be swept away by competitors who do. It's that simple. Some things just take time, no matter how smart you are or how hard you try.