Australia's Federal Government clipped the baby bonus by less than 10%, and the backlash was loud. The same dynamic shows up in customer-delight programs: once customers expect it, taking it back hurts more than never offering it in the first place. Here's why customer delight can be counter-productive, and what to do instead.
Customer feedback isn't a thermometer reading — it comes back tangled with halo effects, three-year-old memories and irrelevant tangents. That doesn't make it useless. Here's why messy data is still rich data, and how to stop "the data isn't clean enough" being used as a reason not to act.
Big-bang CX redesigns are risky, expensive and often miss the mark. Process plant engineers know better — they extract incremental improvement continuously, and so should you. Here's how Transactional NPS lets you do the same thing for customer experience, starting with your worst-scoring touch-points.
Most CX initiatives follow the same flawed playbook: design once, roll out, then relax. That works for a brochure. It does not work for a customer experience. Ten years in industrial process control taught me what continuous improvement actually looks like — here's what to do instead, and why Transactional NPS belongs at the centre of it.
![[Case Study]: The Qantas Grounding: A Strategic Customer Experience Initiative](/_astro/QantasPlane.las_8XPS.jpg)
Grounding the entire Qantas fleet looks like a textbook CX disaster — every commentator said so at the time. The alternative scenario, played out over the months that followed, was worse. Here's the case that a sharp short-term shock can be a strategic customer experience decision, not just a brand catastrophe.
A Colloquy cross-cultural loyalty study turned up an awkward result for Australia: of every country surveyed, Australians were the least welcoming of foreign brand competition. The numbers are uncomfortable. Here's what the data shows, and what it might say about how Australian customers see the world.