When a big B2B opportunity goes the other way, you've spent six to twenty-four months on it, and the cheapest way to learn is a win/loss interview. The questions you ask decide whether you get usable insight or just polite hindsight. Here are the 13 must-have questions, the ones to avoid, and where each fits in the interview flow.
Twenty years running a business will teach you a fair bit about customer service, but it's not everything. So we asked twelve small-business owners and customer service experts a single question: what's your personal, number-one customer service must-do? The answers are sharper, weirder and more actionable than the textbooks.
Before any of the survey effort matters, the recipient has to open the email, and the subject line is the entire decision. Across millions of survey invites sent for clients, the patterns are consistent enough to be a checklist. Here are seven rules for subject lines that beat the delete reflex: keep it short and sincere, make it about the customer, skip emojis, use a person as the sender.
Half the books on the recommended-CX-reading lists are recycled consulting deck. The other half quietly change how you think about customer experience. Here's the regularly-updated list of the most popular CX books, ranked by Amazon ratings, split into generalist and tools-and-methodology, so you can pick the one that's right for what you need now.
Most CX makeovers are announced loudly, then quietly under-deliver against the expectations the announcement set up. Kmart's turnaround did the opposite: they fixed the experience first and let customers notice. Here's what that approach looks like in practice, and why it tends to beat the big-bang announcement.
Forrester's three secrets of great CX organisations turn out to be good leadership, collaborative teams and enough resources. Those aren't CX secrets, they're the secrets to running any support function well. Here's the case that Customer Experience Management is mostly a new theatre for old skills, not a new craft.