Anne-Laura's daily ritual of reading customer feedback in the morning represents more than just staying informed about customer sentiment. It embodies a fundamental philosophy about maintaining human connection in data-driven organizations. While most executives begin their mornings with financial reports or market updates, Anne-Laura deliberately chooses to start with the unfiltered voices of real customers.
The practice reflects her core belief about customer experience: "I'm generally curious about the customer and the human, the real human of the customer, not the Excel file." This distinction—between customers as data points and customers as complex human beings—shapes everything from how she communicates insights to leadership to how her organization approaches transparency and improvement.
Her approach challenges the prevailing tendency to abstract customer experience into metrics and scorecards, advocating instead for maintaining direct, emotional connection to the people organizations exist to serve.
When Anne-Laura includes literal customer quotes in every report and presentation, she's applying a principle that cognitive science has long understood: stories engage different parts of our brains than statistics. "If I had reporting about customer satisfaction scores or customer effort scores, I always put the quotes, literal quotes of customers in there because then all of a sudden they feel the happiness or the dissatisfaction or the sentiment," she explains.
This practice addresses several critical challenges in organizational customer understanding:
Emotional Resonance: Numbers engage analytical thinking, but customer quotes activate empathy and emotional intelligence. A Net Promoter Score of 7 provides limited insight, but a customer saying "The technician took time to explain everything clearly, which saved my important client presentation" creates immediate understanding of value and impact.
Contextual Richness: Customer quotes reveal the interconnected nature of experiences that departmental metrics often miss. As Anne-Laura notes, "When a customer explains what it's experience, it's generally something that is just touching upon many things in one story." A single quote might reference website usability, sales knowledge, delivery timing, and product quality.
Authenticity and Credibility: Raw customer voices carry authenticity that processed data cannot match. They provide unfiltered reality checks that challenge organizational assumptions and reveal gaps between internal perceptions and customer reality.
Memorability: Executives might forget quarterly satisfaction statistics, but they remember compelling customer stories. This memorability ensures customer voices continue influencing decisions long after presentations end.
Accessibility: Not everyone can interpret complex analytics, but everyone can understand and relate to customer stories told in their own words. This democratizes customer insight throughout the organization.
Research in behavioral psychology demonstrates that morning routines significantly influence cognitive patterns throughout the day. What we consume first primes our mental frameworks and decision-making processes. Anne-Laura's practice of starting with customer feedback creates what psychologists call "cognitive priming" toward customer-centric thinking.
Traditional business news consumption reinforces inside-out perspectives focused on market conditions, competitor actions, and internal metrics. Customer feedback consumption establishes outside-in mindsets that prioritize human impact and customer value. This priming effect influences every subsequent business decision throughout the day.
The practice also creates emotional priming. Starting the day reading about customer frustrations or delights activates emotional centers of the brain and connects them to business outcomes. This emotional engagement proves crucial for making decisions that truly serve customer needs rather than just optimizing internal processes.
Cognitive Conditioning: Daily exposure to customer voices trains the brain to default to customer perspective in business discussions. Instead of asking "How are we performing?" the primed mind asks "How are we impacting the people we serve?"
Accountability Creation: When you start each day reading about how organizational decisions affect real people's lives, it becomes harder to make choices that prioritize internal convenience over customer value. The abstract concept of "customer impact" becomes concrete and immediate.
Pattern Recognition: Regular customer feedback consumption develops intuitive understanding of customer needs and behaviors that aggregated data often obscures. This pattern recognition enables more effective decision-making and opportunity identification.
Anne-Laura's most striking example involves her organization's decision to share complete market research results with customers—including areas needing improvement. "We just said, this is what we learned, you're satisfied about A, B, C, and we need to work on these and these things, and they're going to be our priority this year. And we promise you to keep you in the loop about the progress."
The response was overwhelmingly positive: "We got so much positive reactions just based on that first email... this is how a company should communicate. You are an example for the sector." This transparency became what Anne-Laura calls "an accelerator, a multiplicator" for customer satisfaction.
Modern customers are sophisticated and skeptical. They understand no organization is perfect and can detect inauthentic communication. In this context, genuine transparency becomes a differentiator rather than a liability. Customers appreciate organizations that treat them as intelligent partners rather than passive recipients of marketing messages.
The transparency approach also creates powerful internal accountability. "Because we promised it and we wrote it down, it was really a focus point and a priority for the company to continue working on it," Anne-Laura explains. Public commitments to customers create external pressure that reinforces internal motivation and resource allocation.
Albert Heijn (The Netherlands)
The Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn demonstrates sophisticated customer voice integration through their "Bonuskaart" loyalty program. Beyond providing discounts, they use purchase data to create personalized weekly offers and recipe recommendations. Their app helps shoppers navigate stores based on individual shopping lists, creating highly relevant experiences that show deep understanding of customer needs and preferences. This granular personalization reflects the kind of human-centered thinking that Anne-Laura advocates—seeing customers as individuals with unique needs rather than demographic segments.
Anne-Laura Janssens' approach represents more than tactical practices; it embodies a philosophy about maintaining human connection in increasingly digital business environments. Her morning ritual of customer feedback consumption, practice of including customer quotes in business communications, and commitment to transparency create ripple effects throughout organizations.
When leaders consistently prioritize customer voices over internal metrics, they model customer-centric mindsets that influence how teams approach problems, allocate resources, and measure success. The practice gradually shifts organizational culture toward empathy and human understanding, making teams more skilled at seeing work from customer perspectives.
Ultimately, the choice between spreadsheet customers and human customers isn't just about customer experience strategy; it's about the kind of organization you want to build and the impact you want to have in the world.
By starting each day with customer voices rather than business metrics, leaders can catalyze transformations that touch every aspect of how organizations understand their purpose and measure their success. In a business environment increasingly dominated by automation and artificial intelligence, this human-centered approach may well become the most important differentiator for building lasting customer relationships and sustainable competitive advantages.
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