Should customer loyalty management be a separate team or distributed across the business? Plenty of organisations get stuck on the question — and stuck means nothing changes. Here's a best-practice structure that works in real organisations, starting with C-level commitment and ending with operations owning operations, not loyalty owning operations.
Most teams stall on retention waiting for cleaner data or better segmentation. The Aberdeen research is blunt: best-in-class companies do more and analyse less. Here's the case for acting on the data you already have, and why "our data isn't good enough" is usually a stalling tactic.
Most customer feedback programs launch with energy and quietly die between months 12 and 24. The six causes are predictable — lack of senior buy-in, no business linkage, siloed implementation, treating it as a project instead of a process — and each one is preventable if you spot it at the start. Here's the checklist.
I take pretty much every customer satisfaction survey I'm sent — it's a useful way to see what works and what to avoid. This is the first in a deconstruction series: a real survey from a web-hosting company, what they got right, and where it quietly fell over. Names removed; the lessons aren't.
An IT service delivery manager claimed his only measurement of customer experience was the ITIL service delivery process. That's a familiar mistake: confusing system-driven call-management metrics with the customer's actual experience. Here's where ITIL helps, where it's quietly blind, and how to layer customer feedback on top so you're tracking what customers care about — not just what's easy to measure.
Mystery shopping has been the standard "how are we doing at the front line" tool for decades. Transactional NPS surveys — practical only in the last few years — quietly do most of the same job for less cost, with the customer's actual voice. Here's the side-by-side, where mystery shopping still wins, and where transactional surveys clearly take over.