Customer-delight programs feel right and are nearly impossible to make repeatable. The HBR research "Stop trying to delight your customers" puts a number on it: making business easy beats delighting at building loyalty. Here's what that research actually found, why Transactional NPS beats Customer Effort Score for capturing the same signal, and how to run the survey at scale without drowning.
Refer-a-friend programs are everywhere — and the recent Schmitt-Skiera-Van den Boulte paper finally puts hard numbers behind whether they actually pay. The answer is yes: customers from paid referral programs retain longer and contribute more margin than non-referred customers. Here's the data, and what it means for how much to spend on stimulated word-of-mouth.
Friend-get-friend programs use social networks to win customers. Marketing Science Institute research shows the same effect runs in reverse: when a customer defects, their network neighbours are measurably more likely to follow. Here's how to use that finding to spot at-risk customers earlier — and act on it.
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.
Academic critiques of NPS keep arriving, and a couple of them are worth taking seriously. Most aren't. Here's a walk through one widely-cited paper that gets the logic — and the methodology — backwards, and what it tells us about the wider debate.
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.