Oscar Trimboli is on a quest to create 100 million “deep listeners” in the world. As a former marketing director at Vodafone and Microsoft, Oscar has always been passionate about the importance of listening to his customers.
In this episode, Oscar talks about the five levels of a “deep listener,” why focusing solely on the person speaking doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be a better listener, the cost of not being a deep and present listener in the workplace, what he would have his team listen for while reviewing calls from customers, how he used the insights gained from listeners to customers into other aspects of the company, and so much more.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Oscar Trimboli’s Website
- Oscar Trimboli’s Whitepaper
- Oscar Trimboli’s Podcast
- Oscar Trimboli’s Book: Deep Listening
Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcript
Hey, hey. It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today I have with me Oscar Trimboli. He is on a quest to create 100 million deep listeners in the world. I am excited to hear what he means by that. As a former marketing director at Vodafone and Microsoft, Oscar has always been passionate about the importance of listening to his customers and he brought that passion to the next generation leaders at Microsoft, rebuilding their graduate leadership program which was implemented in 26 countries.
Andrea: Oscar, let’s start with this: what is deep listening?
Oscar Trimboli: Well, most of us see in color but most of us only really listen in black and white. We listen to what’s heard and what we see, but a deep listener listens at five levels. They listen to themselves first, they listen to the content next, they listen to the context after that, they listen to what’s unsaid. It sounds like a bit of a Ninja move but we’ll explain that. And ultimately, they listen for meanings. So deep listening is your ability to listen and have an impact beyond the words.
Andrea: OK, so what made you, in particular, interested in this topic? Where did this originate for you because this is obviously something you really care a lot about?
Oscar Trimboli: Well, as I look back, there wasn’t a lightning bolt moment where something happened and it all fell into place. I’m not that fortunate. But as I look through my school life where I went to a school with 23 nationalities, I would be able to listen to and connect their non-English-speaking migrants with the English speakers at school, the sports jocks and the academics together, the teachers and the students. That ability to listen beyond what was being said and listen to people’s intention and their body language was really handy because we played a variety of card games at school, some of them card games that you’d call English card games, some of them Italian card games, and some of them Chinese card games. I was always asked to be on everybody’s team, because I didn’t know it consciously then but I was listening for people’s body language in those days.
As I went through various stages in my professional career, there was this consistent thread. I always never struggled to hire people as a people manager whereas a lot of people managers did. What I learned later on was it was because I was really customer focused in that before every team meeting that we had, you had to spend a half an hour in the contact center as a team listening to what the customers were actually saying. So it might surprise some people who might be business owners out there that when you’re working in a large corporation, you’re not very close to your customer at all. The closest you get to a customer might be a row in a spreadsheet or a graph that’s generated. Or maybe you get really close and you hear a piece of the verbatim feedback that is the transcription of what a customer said.
So my teams were always encouraged to put on the headphones and then go to the contact center in… I’m dating myself here because we didn’t always have software to log into the contact center, but listening. And if you wanted to interview with me or join my team, everybody knew the first question I would ask is, “So based on the last hour you’ve spent speaking to customers, what have you learned?”
That listening thread went all the way through my career. It was about six years ago where somebody said, “Maybe that’s your purpose on the planet is to help people learn to listen as well as you do.”
I was fortunate enough to sit down with a mentor and I said, “Look, by the time I get to 2030, I’d like to train a million listeners in the world.” _____ looked at me and he said, “Sounds kinda simple for you. Do you think you can get there?” And I said, “Yeah, I can see a million listeners really easy.” He said, “Well, if you can achieve it in your lifetime, it’s probably not ambitious enough.” And I said, “Hmm. good point Dermot. I have that 10 million listeners.” And he straight away came back and said, “How about a hundred million listeners. That should safely scare you.” He was right. That stretched my thinking ever since.
Andrea: That’s fascinating. I love this topic. It is so near and dear to my heart because the whole point of having a voice of influence in my mind is actually totally flipping the whole thing around. It’s when you can help others find their voice that’s when you really find your voice of influence.
So the idea of listening, and not just listening but also helping people draw out, and I suppose that’s part of what you talk about, how do you help other people to be able to express or to have the space to express what they’re thinking or what they’re feeling?
Oscar Trimboli: The very first thing most people are taught, if they’re ever taught how to listen, is to focus on the speaker and give them your complete attention. That’s handy but it’s not really the powerful foundation of deep listening. Deep listening actually starts with you. If you’ve got so much self-talk in your own mind, if you’ve got a story playing in your head, if you’ve got a movie going on about the next thing that’s going to happen or the last drama that you’re trying to process, it’s very difficult for you to have space in your head to listen to the other person.
And listening to yourself is the foundational component of being a deep listener. You need to be available to the other person to listen. In doing so, I’ve researched about 1,410 people over the last 24 months in a consistent survey group and 86 percent of people don’t struggle with focusing on the other person. The things they talk about is the distraction in their head, their inability to stay in the dialogue. They’re big struggles that people have when it comes to listening.
So three really simple tips are the deeper you breathe the deeper you listen, so holding your breath a little bit longer, exhaling a little bit longer. I’m not asking people to move into a yoga pose before they listen to people.
But whether you’re an opera singer, a navy SEAL or an Olympic-level athlete, they all breathe very deeply. They do something called box breathing. So if you visualize making a box out of your lungs where you go down one side, you go across and you come back up. Then just hold that breath and take it in 10 seconds longer. They hold it for 10 seconds longer. They exhale for 10 seconds longer because listening is a very high load on your mind. So if you can get oxygen to the brain, you’ll be a better listener.
So tip number one, deepen your breathing. Tip number two, a hydrated brain is a listening brain. Your body uses 25 percent of its blood sugars in the brain. So anything you can do to get the blood sugars to the brain faster is a good thing. So always have a glass of water when you’re listening to somebody. A cup of coffee is interesting but it’s not helpful. So water and coffee, that’s really good as well.
Finally, and probably the most difficult for everybody to do, switch off your mobile phone, switch off your cell phone, switch off your laptop, switch off your iPad device or tablets. Get them out of the way. It’s no coincidence that software designers from the slot industry, from Las Vegas that help people stay in the zone that’s completely dopamine-enabled they have dings and colored lights coming on and it’s exactly the same on your cell phone. The red notifications, the ding that you get and that’s completely designed to fry your brain and distract you.
So the most powerful example of this I saw was a traveling exec that I was hosting in 2010. He had flown all the way from Seattle to Sydney. That’s an 18-hour plane ride. But he got straight off the plane and into a meeting with me with 10 business owners in a hotel in Sydney. And Peter stood up and announced himself to the group, sat down and then realized something. He stood up again and he says, “Forgive me. I’ve left my phone on.” So he went to his bag. He took his phone out of his bag; he switched it off, announced it switched off and then put it back in his bag.
Andrea, what do you think happened to the other 10 execs in the room at that moment?
Andrea: They all went and did the same thing with their own phones.
Oscar Trimboli: Yeah, so seven of the 10 people did that.
Andrea: That’s fantastic.
Oscar Trimboli: Three didn’t but the point is a lot of leaders ask me and a lot of people who are parents ask me, “How do I teach other people how to listen,” and I always say role model listening. And in that moment, Peter said, “The most important thing I can do for the next hour is give my full attention to this group of people.” That was probably one of the most productive meetings I’ve ever seen at that level because nobody was using their phone as a status symbol to show everybody else how much more important something else was than the meeting. And that was a really, really productive meeting and set up a very different experience.
So when I debriefed the leaders, as Peter went to another meeting in another part of the city immediately afterwards, we we’re talking about future technologies and roadmaps of the future and some of the software that people take for granted today. Back eight years ago, it wasn’t even being built. I said, “You know, what was the most useful thing today,” expecting them to talk about software in the future or how much money they can make. They all said to a person, “Watching Peter switch off his phone. It was very empowering.”
Andrea: That’s awesome. I know that it’s really hard for people who feel like they have so many things going on, so many plates spinning, so many people that need things from them to feel like it’s OK to be that present. This is how you do it but explain to me why it is that… you know, what’s the cost of not listening like this? What’s the cost of not being present? What’s the benefit of doing that?
Oscar Trimboli: The cost of not listening is extraordinary in the workplace. We feel that as conflict, confusion, chaos sometimes. We feel that in projects that run a schedule because people leave project update meetings thinking they heard something going and implemented what they think they heard and then coming back to the next project meeting and people looking confused at each other going, “Isn’t that what you told me?”
One of the simple costs of listening is rework. I was talking to a client about six months ago and I was sitting down with her and she’s got a very complicated job sheet. She puts together the pricing of complex financial instruments that help people save money. She was in a meeting with two people who were leaders in the business and that were peers of each other and the two peers weren’t listening to each other but they needed to approve this pricing. One was saying, “We need the pricing lower.” Another one said, “We need the pricing higher.”
Each time my client would go back to her working group and redo the pricing. And every time they redid the pricing was 120 hours of effort. But more importantly, as she noticed, the opportunity for error in this very complex pricing model increased every time they did a new version of the model. So that would come back on a regular basis to this committee doing what they think they heard.
Ultimately, the pricing came back and the ultimate decision maker said, “Why have you gone and put the pricing together like that? We were just thinking out loud. It wasn’t a recommendation to go and change the pricing.”
I come into many situations working with clients in the workplace where the cost of not listening is a simple misunderstanding in the short term, but in the long term it’s a lot of rework. You could even say one of the most significant costs for the 2016 Democratic Party was its inability to listen to its heartland. And the cost for them has been quite significant in US elections as an example. So whether it’s in businesses or organizations.
But my favorite story about the cost of not listening as a client, an executive I was working with about two and a half years ago, Michael, he rang me up on a Friday evening and said, “You’ve nearly cost me my marriage.” I said, “Oh, why is that?” And I’m always very clear. This is always work around deep listening in the workplace. And I said, “Mick, what’s going on?”
He said, “Well, I’ve been doing all your stuff but, last Friday, we put the kids to bed and my wife sat me down and she looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘OK, let’s be honest with each other now. And I want you to tell me straight, are you having an affair?’” And he was completely knocked off his seat. Rather than try and defend it, he just asked his wife why she’d formed that perspective. She said, “For the last eight weeks you have never paid me as much attention as you have in the whole seven years of our marriage. I figured you must be having an affair to cover it up.”
And Michael breathed out at that point. He sighed and he smiled and he explained to his wife that he’s been taught how to listen. She said, “That has completely changed our relationship. Your ability to stay focused on me completely is the most intimate thing you’ve ever done for me.” So sometimes it can cost a marriage.
Andrea: It’s fantastic. I love that example. So let’s go back to when you would take your teams into the customer call center and listen to the customers there. What were you listening for when you were there?
Oscar Trimboli: Personally, I’m listening for a couple of things. The first thing I’m listening for is what is the listening stance that the person in the contact center speaking to the customer is listening for? Are they asking questions that are exploring the content? Are they exploring questions that are exploring the context? Are they doing a great job of understanding the back story and how somebody is coming to the conversation rather than what they’re saying?
So a lot of times in contact centers, contact center agents are asked to literally follow a script. Whether that person calling in or not knows how a contact center works, they know somebody’s following a script. What I noticed very quickly was it was the more experienced contact center agents who are very comfortable going off script being led by the conversation, being in a human-to-human connection, not being in a robotic, scripted example where, well, we have to get the average hold time down, we have to reduce the amount of time people are on hold and we have to get the customers off the call as quickly as possible.
You know, there’s a great example with Zappos where it’s not about the amount of time on hold, it’s not even about the amount of time on call. It’s about the resolution. One of the things I was always careful to make sure we listen for as the marketing organization is what is it that’s missing in the information we need to provide to our customers via our website, via software, via our newsletters, via the voiceover recordings when you’re waiting on hold to arm the contact center agents to be successful? So the other thing we spent a lot of time doing is listening to what’s unsaid and listening to the language that the customers were using and making sure that language is being used in our documentation, not the language that we used.
And we use this very sophisticated MBA-ese kind of language and yet the people who were calling us didn’t speak like that. I always say to people, “Honestly, explain it to me like we’re in a pub.” That’s the best way to explain. “Explain it to me like were in a coffee shop.” That’s the best way to explain it. “Explain it to me like you’re talking to my 5-year-old granddaughter, Ruby, or my 78 year old dad.”
And if you can explain it to them simultaneously using the same language, we’re probably a lot closer than using words like ‘scalability’, ‘synergize’ and all these lovely MBA-ese words that are completely meaningless. They’re jargon-filled words that don’t connect with the problem that the customer has.
Ultimately, what we’re listening for as a group, and I’d always have a thematic challenge for them to listen for, so it might be listening to the problems that are the simplest ones. We’ll listen to the problems that are the easiest to fix or listening to the problems that are costing the customer time or listening to the problems that are frustrating the customer with connecting with other software. And listening to what’s unsaid is really the most potent thing I felt was our learning and our gifts to other parts of the business where we could bring them insights because we were listening to our customers deeply.
Andrea: Oh, that’s interesting. How did you bring these insights to the other parts of the company because that’s, of course, one of the most frustrating or difficult things to actually accomplish? So how did you do that?
Oscar Trimboli: Well, maybe some people can. It’s unusual for people to listen this deeply and this consistently to customers in the contact center. What I would do, I would issue challenges to other divisions to go, “You know, our team spent 17 hours this week listening to customers. How many hours does your team?”
And they’d always go, “Oh yeah, yeah, but you’re our internal customer.” So Finance would always say to us, “You’re our an internal customer. We listen to you.” Or Legal would say the same thing.
And I said, “No.” I said, “That’s a copout.” I said, “I’m only asking you to listen. I’m not asking you to actually take the calls.” Which we did do every quarter. We would make sure that our team not only listened but we would ask them to do three calls as well because it’s a completely different level of empathy for the customer when you’re on the hook as opposed to listening for a contact center agent there. So we would bring, literally, audio recordings into the room where we had customer permission. We apply those to other divisions. And it was more potent when the customer’s voice was heard in a meeting.
Andrea: They’re actually voice.
Oscar Trimboli: Yeah.
Andrea: Nice.
Oscar Trimboli: To explain why that change needed to be made in pricing or why the change needed to be made from a legal point of view. So for a lot of us, particularly when I was working at Vodafone, in mobile communication, in those days pricing was very complicated. We would price per text message, we’d price per dataset, we’d price per call whether it was local or international, and it was really confusing. A customer never really knew where they stood, particularly if they were prepaid and they were paying in advance.
So bring that and it’s the most powerful way to listen. The other thing we did as well was marketers work with a lot of advertising agencies as an example. Typically, when they brief the advertising agency, they’ll put some slides together. They’ll put some market research together, the slides, all that pie charts and pie graphs and some verbatim about what the customer is saying. We actually brought the customers into the advertising agency and we got the advertising agency to listen to them.
So it wasn’t a piece of qualitative market research. That’s a very different approach. But I simply said, “Rather than me explain why this product is important, let me explain that through the potential customers that I’ve brought together today to speak to you.” They loved it because, again, the customer and the way they would explain a problem was completely different to the way that would be translated by the software company that was Microsoft or the telecommunications company that was Vodafone.
So I think in that really simple thing, let the customer’s voice speak for everything. No filters, no translation, no summary. You can curate a group of very simple, diverse stories. We always made sure we had one customer from government and one customer from commercial and one customer from a big organization and one customer from a growing, maybe a smaller number of employee organization. And that’s how you can have an influence without you speaking. That’s how you can give the customer a voice in an environment that’s really powerful to them because, of course, you can guess those customers who came in at that part of the research they wanted your product to succeed because they felt they were part of it, but only because you listened to them.
Andrea: That, in itself, is a powerful statement because I think it’s true across the board when you really listen to people. When they have a voice, they’re going to be more supportive of the ultimate goal.
Oscar Trimboli: And look, we spend a minimum of 55% of our day listening and yet only 2% of us have ever had any training. The more senior you are or the closer to a customer you are, those percentages go up. If you’re the most senior executive in an organization or an owner, you’re probably spending 80 to 85% of your day listening to customers, suppliers and staff. If you’re in a contact center, it’s closer to 90% of your day spending listening to customers.
We’ve spent the 20th century learning how to speak. I’m on a quest to spend the 21st century training people on how to listen because they spend half the day doing it. If you wanted the productivity hack of the 21st century, it’s how to listen.
Andrea: How can companies better listen to those people who are on the front lines, these customer-facing teams? How can they listen to them better so that they have a better sense of this? For example, when you were presenting these customer recordings, did those come from when you were in the contact center yourself and you guys drew those out as the marketing team? Or were those things that you asked the actual call center agents to curate and help curate for you?
Oscar Trimboli: Yeah. It was a combination of both. We drew out thematic examples that would support our business case, but equally we asked the contact agents to come up with one call that would be representative of their month. We had a number of themes that we were looking at over a period of time and we would pull out the calls that were recorded by or held up by the contact center agents as the one that supported that theme. So we didn’t tell them what the themes were. We just asked them to give us one a month for the representative call of the customer.
And some of the contact centers I’m dealing with, we’ve got hundreds of agents in the contact center then so the spreadsheets became quite complex because we had to code them. And by code them I don’t mean software but just give them some labels and some themes and stuff like that. Sometimes the labels would be about complexity. The label might be about billing complexity. The label might be about billing complexity and international calls but then we’d have to code it by male-female, we’d have to code it by age group, we’d have to code it by metro-non metro area because the buying behaviors might have been different in those contexts, and we had to code it personal versus business usage. You can imagine it if you were to filter that, you could have a lot of insights there as well.
We also ask the contact center agents to prioritize them and give them a rating of 1 to 5, with 5 as the one they thought was the most representative and 1 the least. In that way we could get them to start to think about what is that thing that is really representative there.
As an interesting example, I’ve interviewed the former head of market research for Coca-Cola and former head of market research for Nike in Asia Pacific. What she said was the most powerful listening you can do as an organization is to watch your customers using your product. The best example she uses was Toyota engineers followed people in supermarket shopping center car parks in the US and just watched. They literally sat there and watched people using competitors’ cars and Toyota cars.
What they discovered very quickly was the lip of the back of the car when people were loading food and groceries into the trunk of the car was just too high. Now, more modern versions of Toyotas have a very flat no-lip on the trunk of the car which makes it easier to get food and groceries into the car.
Now, as Vanessa said to me, she said, “You would never see that in a market research, in qualitative research, and quantitative research because the customer didn’t even know they had that problem. They just thought it was the way cars were made and they just had to deal with it.”
And just listening to that little thing, by going out and watching the customers, Toyota were able to transform that experience. Now, will that make customers more loyal to Toyota? What they noticed is a lot of moms would tell other moms about that and that became a quite a distinctive feature of Toyotas at the period of time.
Now, the market has caught up. A lot of the competitive cars now have adopted that as well. But what’s the lip to the trunk of the car for your customers and your organization? Unless you watch them using your product or your service, you’re very unlikely to be listening deeply to what matters to them.
Andrea: That is a great way for us to wrap up this conversation. I love that, that last image that you gave us in the challenge, really, that is embedded in that.
Oscar, how can people get a hold of you if they want you to come and speak to their company or connect with your website? I know you have a white paper there. Why don’t you share how they can connect?
Oscar Trimboli: The easiest thing to do is just type ‘Oscar Trimboli’ into your search engine. There’s pretty much only one of me on the internet and that will connect you really quickly. If you land on my website, the white paper is there, which will wrap up what we’ve said in a really clear document. There’s also a series of podcasts where I interview professional listeners, whether they’re market researchers or judges or journalists, air traffic controllers or FBI hostage negotiators.
In about three hours I’ll be releasing a Hugh Forrest. The head of South by Southwest from Austin, Texas runs an event and has incredible listening technologies and methods to listen to the 50,000 people that attend South by Southwest every year and create a huge economic impact for the city of Austin in Texas as well. So there’s a great starting point.
If you love to read, check out Deep Listening on Amazon.
Andrea: All right. Thank you so much, Oscar. We’ll be sure to have all of this in the show notes as well. So appreciate you being with us and teaching us how to listen. Let there be more deep listeners because of this podcast.
Oscar Trimboli: Thanks for listening.