Every year a new customer-feedback metric arrives promising to make all the others obsolete. NPS, CSAT, CES, NEV — the arms race never stops. Here's how to pick one and stick with it, and why chasing the latest fad costs you more than it saves.
Most leaders think of the contact centre as a cost line, not a retention engine. That's a mistake — every call is a chance to keep a customer or quietly lose one. Here are nine practical things contact centre teams can do today to stop churn at the source.
275,000 HSBC customers went unpaid on a Friday before a long weekend. It's an extreme example, but your business has its own version — service failures happen, and the recovery process is what decides whether customers stay or leave. This is the long-form implementation guide: definition, business case, sources of leads, and how to make it stick.
Simon Sinek built a TED talk on the power of "why". Toyota built quality systems on it. Toddlers run their entire education on it. Yet most NPS rollouts skip it entirely. Here's why "why" is the first question to ask before investing in Net Promoter — and the kinds of answers that should stop the program before it starts.
Customer feedback programs eventually hit a wall that quality-systems people figured out decades ago in manufacturing — continuous improvement, reducing process variation, the discipline of acting on data. Most CX teams haven't learned the lessons. With transactional feedback giving you the volume and speed, here's how to plug quality systems into customer feedback and stop reinventing what Taylor and Deming already solved.
Customer surveys exhibit a marketing version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: the act of surveying changes the customer being surveyed. Dholakia and Morwitz's HBR research tracked surveyed customers over two years and found they were three times more likely to open new accounts, half as likely to defect, and more profitable. Here's the effect, the explanation, and what it means for survey design.