The Power of Being the Person Who Listens

What customer success taught me about trust, leadership, and finding strength in making space for others

Women in business often struggle with conflicting advice: Speak Up/Quiet Down/Act Now/Gather Facts. As a leader, the best advice I would give is to learn active listening. To be an active listener, you must ask pointed questions and be quiet, vet what you learn, and then take decisive action. Some of the most important lessons in my years of customer service came when I stopped talking and started listening beyond surface context into sub context. Recently, I’ve made big changes based on feedback from customers, my team and my own intuition as a leader.

Listening beyond what the customer is saying  

Customers can’t always articulate the real issue, and a survey alone doesn’t cut through the noise. When my Client Experience team receives a complaint about a product or service, they’re trained to resist defensiveness and ask thoughtful follow-up questions, expressing sympathy and a desire to help. The conversation inevitably reveals a deeper concern, and this is where the real problem lies.

Recently, through customer conversations and survey feedback, my team began seeing a pattern: clients need more than support when they have a problem. Support alone wasn’t getting to the heart of things. What they were asking for, without realizing it, was proactive education, better access to knowledge, and help understanding how to get more value from the products and services they already have.

Initially, it would have been easy to interpret that feedback simply as: We need to communicate more. But the more I listened, the clearer it became that the need was bigger than communication and not limited to our clients.

Our internal teams, including Sales and Account Management, were often relying on Client Experience to find critical product information, answer questions, or explain how our solutions work. Important knowledge existed across the organization, but it wasn’t always easy to find, consistently documented, or readily accessible. Customers and our own internal teams wanted to feel more knowledgeable, confident, and self-sufficient.

That showed us that enablement needed to serve two audiences: our clients and our employees. That was the real insight: we had an enablement gap. The next step was how to solve it.

Listening Is Leadership, Not Weakness

Career progression brings plenty of outside voices: expectations, advice, criticism, assumptions about what leadership should look like. We often think leaders should have all the answers, be confident, and have the loudest voices. Experience has taught me differently. Listening gave me information from my team and customers that I wouldn’t have accessed if I were busy taking up space. If I had just asked the existing teams to do more and called it a day, nobody would have felt more knowledgeable, confident or self-sufficient. I’ve learned listen to my own intuition: I needed to empower our customers, my team, and the organization.

Instead of simply asking the existing teams to do more, I created a dedicated Client Enablement function. The role is focused on building scalable education and resources for both clients and our internal teams, including training, knowledge content, digital resources, and other ways to help people better understand and use our solutions. I chose someone from within the organization for the role, as they already understood our clients, products, and many of the challenges.

This experience reinforced something for me about listening: the first thing someone tells you isn't always the problem you need to solve. Customers said they wanted to know more. If I had stopped there, the answer might have been more emails, more meetings, or more touchpoints. By continuing to listen to customers and to my own team, I identified a larger opportunity to empower everyone.

We’ve all come across that first moment in our early careers where we felt the exhilaration of being heard and making a difference.  As leaders, this should make us hyper aware of the power, and the empowerment behind active listening. Listening is one of the most valuable leadership skills. As women, we need to of course speak up but also listen. We need to gather facts, trust our own intuition, and take decisive action. The strongest leader isn’t the loudest but she knows how to let others feel heard.

About the Author:

Eleonore Adkins is the Vice President of Customer Experience at IPS with 15+ years in parking and mobility. She leads Client Success, Implementations, and Support, delivering accountable onboarding and operations. She built a proactive CX framework improving satisfaction, retention, and time-to-value, with expertise in municipal deployments and service transformation. 

About IPS Group:

IPS Group, Inc. pioneered the first smart parking meter more than 25 years ago and today delivers a fully integrated smart parking ecosystem for municipalities, private operators, universities, hospitals, and other parking organizations.

At the foundation of IPS culture are the four P’s: People, who are at the heart of everything we do; Possibilities, as we develop future-ready technology designed to scale and evolve with our customers; Partners, with whom we build lasting relationships grounded in trust; and Proven, reflecting more than 25 years of innovation, experience, and commitment to the parking industry.

IPS Group manufactures single-space and multi-space smart meters and kiosks in San Diego, California, supported by a comprehensive Data Management System for centralized management and reporting. Our broader technology ecosystem includes enforcement software and hardware, permitting solutions, LPR technology, mobile payment options, and Elevate™, our latest software platform. Elevate brings parking data from multiple systems into a single dashboard, providing customizable reporting and AI-powered insights that help operators make better-informed decisions.

As parking operators navigate an increasingly complex curb environment, fragmented technology stacks, aging infrastructure, and growing pressure to do more with fewer resources, IPS Group provides simple, cost-effective, integrated solutions. Our technology helps operators modernize at their own pace, simplify operations, and build the flexible parking infrastructure their communities and customers need—today and into the future.