Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

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Our Fragile Hearing

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More and more Americans are experiencing the social disorientation that comes with partial deafness. No longer just grandpa’s problem, its now a development affecting millions of younger Americans.

Imagine that you have a friend who has the unusual habit of glancing directly at the sun while they conversing with someone outdoors. That’s not a good thing.  Obviously, the sun is too intense for sensitive eyes, a point we would surely make to the friend.  A lifetime with such a habit will leave them with a host of eye problems, if not complete blindness.

Suppose you have another acquaintance who is rarely seen without lanyards hanging down from her ears. They are always present when she is commuting or working at her desk.  Like millions, she would rather forget her purse than not having her ear buds with her.  And because the sounds she listens to spill out beyond her ears, you can tell what music she likes.

In a sense, she is also looking into the sun. The volume level of her music is probably past a threshold where loudness so close to the ear is safe. Like one in three Americans, she on her way to hearing loss, which will mean that in a few years she will be struggling to connect in a wide variety of social settings.

Our dilemma is that we live in a loud world that our ears were not designed for. Think of noise as aural trash: stuff that piles up around us that we hardly notice less because it has no visual presence.  But its there all of the time: at music concerts where the sound is punishingly loud, or in the everyday equipment of modern life like leaf blowers, hair dryers, vacuums, and hundreds of other sources.  Previews shown in movie theaters, for example, regularly play at about 100 dB: only slightly less than standing at the end of an airport runway.  With this kind of noise, a person’s hearing will deteriorate over time.  There are bones in the middle ear to protect us from loudness.  But they are no match for what we throw at them.

Loud sound destroys the microscopic stereocilia–tiny thin cells–in the cochlea within the inner ear. They do the important work of converting sound pressure waves into nerve impulses sent to the brain.  One scientist studying the cilia of a nearly deaf person said they looked like a forest of trees that had been blown over in a storm.  But unlike a forest, they usually will not regrow.

New research points out that there are significant costs for those who have lost even a fraction of their listening acuity. With hearing loss, clinical dementia increases by 50 percent and depression by 40 percent. Overall, participants in some studies report increased feelings of isolation and disconnectedness, as documented by a reporter recounting the story of one 68-year-old woman.

[H]er world began to shrivel. She stopped going to church, since she could no longer hear the sermons. She abandoned the lectures that she used to frequent, as well as the political rallies that she had always loved. Communicating with her adult sons became an ordeal, filled with endless requests that they repeat themselves. Now considered as hazardous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, loneliness vastly raises the risks of depression, dementia and early death.

Your ears will not send messages that they are being forced into a destructive death spiral. You need to be motivated enough to protect them. Exercise a few simple precautions to stave off hearing loss.

  • Always wear ear protection at arena concerts and even professional sporting events. In my recent book, The Sonic Imperative, I reported that one baseball stadium nearby is equipped with 1400 loudspeakers. Fans notice that noise at a game is frequently over the top, since the sound system is programmed like a dance club.                                                                                                                                    
  • Always wear ear protection when using power equipment like lawnmowers, lawn trimmers, leaf blowers and even vacuum cleaners and hunting rifles.  I use a comfortable 21-dollar 3M over the ear headset.  There are even many with Bluetooth speakers in them: an incredibly dumb idea.                                                                                                                                                    
  • Carry a clean pocket tissue. When an event turns into an unexpected auditory assault, such as in a movie theater or noisy bar, it pays to have a piece of tissue that can be crushed and placed at the entrance of the ear canals, temporarily muting the racket.                                                                                         
  • When listening to music, playing games or watching videos, learn to set aside the mistaken belief that louder is always better. Heed the cautions that come with portable audio players. In many cases, loudness creates unpleasant distortion and listening fatigue.                                                                         
  • Teach your children about the fragility of hearing.  We know from studies that teens will reject requests to ‘turn it down.’ The message needs to come earlier.

The ability to hear is a wonderful gift, and modern applications of sound are full of interesting surprises.  For more insights see The Sonic Perspective: Sound in the Age of Screens, available at a low price from Amazon.com.

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The Scourge of Closed Option Questionnaires

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Most organizations are disinclined to invest in the labor to directly address a consumer question or complaint. Their pattern of not wanting to authentically listen mirrors our modern malady of wanting to be heard more than we want hear.

Organizations now operate with the perceived need to survey customers about the quality of the service they received. The impulse is fine.  They want satisfied consumers.  And they would welcome high ratings that can be part of their advertising and marketing campaigns.  Then, too, many consumers now understand a thing or two about the logic of consumer behavior. They know that a failing business may only see a customer once, especially if competitors are just a click away.

Savvy customers and attentive businesses are all good.  But the instruments for measuring customer satisfaction are often facile. The best tool for learning about a customer’s experience is a live representative ready to trouble-shoot a problem.  But person to person contact is increasingly rare.  Most organizations are not inclined to invest in the staff that would require. Their pattern of not wanting to authentically listen mirrors our modern malady of wanting to frame a conversation before the other can respond. I have noticed that even at auto service departments, agents are often too busy keying in routine data about my car, such as mileage, to ask what kind of service it may need. Most don’t even ask why I made the appointment.

But the worst offender in the measurement of customer satisfaction is the online, phone or mail questionnaire.  Most are written to be tallied and converted into a number for each item. You know the drill:

“How would you rank your service experience?”

Very Good      Good        Fair          Poor

Would you recommend this product to others?       Yes         No

For obvious reasons these are called a “closed” option questions. Your attitude is to be gleaned from the adjective that you identify frequently from an outline questionnaire.

I recently completed a multi-page questionnaire for a newly purchased car.  And, incredibly, even with all the questions, the carmaker failed to set up a form that would let me clearly state my reason’s for the purchase.  (If you are interested, key controls were not on a fussy touch screen.)

Closed option questions appear to be good for the organization because they can be tabulated, hence, quantified, hence assumed “objective.” The bean counters among us love them. Even as a college teacher, I was required to give out these uniform questionnaires. But much of the feedback is coated in a thick fog of ambiguity.  For a student, useful feedback to a professor is not judging class lectures to be only “fair,” but their reasons for circling this term.

If any organization asks a really good question about their service (i.e., “What was most disappointing about your experience?”), the organization might learn something, but this kind of open-option question cannot be numerically tallied.  And A.I. technology is not that smart.  A person within the company would have to read the statement and engage in some active problem solving (especially if the same problem is mentioned by others). That’s an interpretive act: the kind of creative analysis we are squeezing out of routine consumer practices. To be sure, a car manufacturer will get a great deal of attention from a company representative who wants to sell them a zillion tires. The consumer looking for just a good set of four?  Not so much.