The Power of Listening in a Noisy World
By Kristen Hayer
If you spend time watching the news or scrolling social media, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the volume of voices. Messages pull us in multiple directions. Meetings, metrics, and pitches demand constant attention. In all that noise, real listening feels both uncommon and powerful.
For customer success professionals, listening is not just a competency. It is a differentiator. It shapes product roadmaps, builds trust with customers, and creates deeper, more strategic relationships. In a world where everyone is trying to talk, the ability to listen well becomes a competitive skill that sets professionals apart.
Listening Is a Strategic Advantage
Many CSMs feel pressure to constantly present, deliver, and manage expectations. That can make calls feel like presentations rather than conversations. The best CSMs shift roles. They listen first, ask clarifying questions, and reflect understanding. That shift transforms a status call into a strategic dialogue and helps customers lead value-focused discussions.
True listening creates space for trust. It allows customers to feel heard. It invites collaboration rather than reaction.
What the Brain Tells Us About Listening
In face-to-face interaction, research shows that when two people engage in conversation, their brain waves synchronize. This phenomenon is known as neural synchrony.
That synchrony creates shared understanding, builds rapport, and helps both sides feel seen and safe. Listening does more than gather information. It helps both parties relax into the conversation and do better work together.
Listening Shifts the Relationship
When CSMs listen deeply, they move from reactive service to strategic partnership. They surface insights that customers may not even realize themselves. They uncover risk, discover opportunities, and bring cross-functional teams into the conversation earlier and with greater relevance.
Active listening does not mean silence throughout a meeting. It means asking open-ended questions. It means reflecting back what you heard. It means pausing to let new ideas emerge. In those moments, customers feel understood. They share more and open up.
Listening as a Leadership Skill
Empathy and listening are leadership skills, not just service skills. As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, put it, “Listening was the most important thing I accomplished each day because it would build the foundation of leadership for years to come.”
That insight reinforces the idea that listening shapes the insights that make leadership effective.
CS professionals act as interpreters between the customer and the rest of the organization. They translate insight into action and advocate for customer needs. When leaders model listening, it cascades through the team and shapes the culture.
Listening Beyond Work
Listening extends past customer calls; it is also a civic skill. In a time of division and polarization, the act of listening becomes a powerful tool. It reduces defensiveness, fosters curiosity, and builds bridges.
CS teams practice connection amid complexity every day. If more people adopted that mindset, by listening before responding, seeking to understand, and imagining others’ perspectives, we might see more progress and less conflict.
How to Practice Intentional Listening
These actions help sharpen your ability to listen deeply:
☐ Start meetings with a few open questions
☐ If silence feels uncomfortable, count to seven before speaking
☐ Reflect back what you heard to ensure mutual understanding
☐ Take notes to capture nuance, not just task items
☐ Approach every call with curiosity, not assumption
These habits may feel slow. But they create clarity, trust, and momentum.
Final Thought: Listening as a Quiet Superpower
In an environment that prizes sound and speed, listening is a quiet superpower. It transforms conversations, deepens relationships, and sets you apart in CS.
Listening is not just what a person does. It is who they are. For CSMs, it is how they lead.
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers CSM Certification training. The full series includes a course, CSM Communication, which details how to lead successful conversations. For more on this and our other offerings, visit TheSuccessLeague.io.
Kristen Hayer - Kristen founded The Success League in 2015 and currently serves as the company's CEO. Over the past 25 years Kristen has been a success, sales, and marketing executive, primarily working with scaling tech companies, and leading several award-winning customer success teams. She has written over 100 articles on customer success, and is the host of 3 podcasts about the field. Kristen has served as a judge for the Customer Success Excellence awards, and is on the board of several early-stage tech companies. She received her MBA from the University of Washington in Seattle, and now lives in San Francisco.