The Blog

A great score on one feedback attribute often means nothing more than a great score on brand image colouring everything else. Psychologists have known about the halo effect for a century, most CX teams still report scores as if it didn't exist. Here's how to spot it in your data, with a worked example from a Canstar mobile-phone survey.

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.

Comparing two survey averages and calling them different (or the same) is the most common mistake in customer feedback reporting — and it leads to killing things that are working and persisting with things that aren't. Here's how to run Student's t-Test in Excel to know whether the change is real, with a step-by-step worked example.

Some companies operate at high performance year after year, and others scrap to stay in business. The variable most often missing from the under-performers is genuine customer advocacy, a way of operating that goes well beyond fee-for-service. Here's how high-performing companies set themselves apart, written by guest contributor Seb Atkinson.

"I don't believe that NPS, you don't have a big enough sample size." It's becoming the go-to objection from anyone who doesn't like a feedback result. Most of the time it's wrong, and a five-point dataset can be statistically meaningful. Here's what sample size actually means, and how to get past slide one without an argument.

Writing a customer survey from a blank page is a slog, and that's why so many surveys end up oddly shaped. Break the survey into the five logical sections every survey needs (intro, attributes, outcomes, closing, thanks), and the drafting work shrinks dramatically. Here's the template, with what each section is for.