Presenting negative customer feedback to executives, the room goes from agreeable nodding to defensive deflection at exactly the slide where specifics start showing. Defend, defer, deflect, deny — the four Ds. Until executives own the feedback, nothing changes. Here's how to get past the 4Ds, including the first-hand customer experience that does more than any chart.
From the outside, customer feedback and market research look like the same thing — surveys, analysis, charts to the executive. They aren't. One is operational management, the other is strategic exploration. Mix them up and the feedback program quietly stops driving change. Here's the distinction, laid out plainly enough to argue with your research vendor.
The Australian Privacy Principles came into force on 12 March 2014, and they have specific implications for the way customer feedback programs are run — particularly the direct marketing rule (APP 7) and cross-border disclosure rule (APP 8). Here's a non-lawyer's walk-through of what changed and what to update in your feedback program. Caveats apply; this is not legal advice.
Without explicit governance, a transactional NPS program drifts back to whoever has the loudest objection. Best practice uses two specific groups — a Steering Committee and a Process Team — operating in a three-layer model. Here's the membership of each, what they're responsible for, and how the model holds the program steady through executive churn.
Club Med's post-stay survey arrives personalised, well-timed, and immediately falls apart — images-as-content, question overload, and a hidden lead-gen form at the end. Here's a teardown of where a well-resourced brand's customer survey went wrong, and the specific mistakes that are worth not copying in yours.
Small B2B businesses often assume they're too small for serious customer feedback or NPS — not enough customers, too informal a relationship. Wrong on both counts. Customer feedback scales down better than most enterprise consultants admit. Here are the four steps that make NPS work in a small or medium B2B organisation, starting with the hardest one: preparing to hear the truth.