The Blog

Australian general insurance is a brutal price war with new overseas online entrants undercutting on premium. The Buzz Insurance — IAG-backed — went the other way: co-created their loyalty program with thousands of customers via focus groups, market research and the My Insurance Ideas community. Here's what they built, and why customers responded to a loyalty program that wasn't dressed up as a discount.

Most call centres run their processes the way most drivers run their cars — until something breaks. There's a better model, and it doesn't have to mean a big lean-six-sigma program. Here's what continuous process improvement actually looks like in a contact centre, and why the businesses that adopt it pull steadily ahead of the businesses that don't.

By the time a customer is calling to close their account, most of your retention levers are gone — but not all of them. The companies that save these customers do it with a dedicated Save Team, staffed differently and equipped differently to a normal service desk. Here's how to set one up.

A 50/50 split on which vendor to award is a sign the tender process needs help, not that one of the vendors needs to negotiate harder. Here's what to do when a call centre technology tender has stalled — the review framework, the missing criteria, and how to get the project team to a defendable recommendation for the board.

Hotels are scanning Twitter for complaints from guests in their own building, then quietly upgrading the loudest ones. It's clever, and it might also be teaching customers exactly the wrong lesson about how to get good service. Here's where reactive social-media service crosses from helpful into perverse.

Database marketers have used Recency-Frequency-Monetary scoring since direct mail was the cutting edge — and Recency is consistently the best predictor of response. So how does NPS link to RFM? It turns out there's a clear, useful overlap that lets you combine both signals to predict next-best customer behaviour.