A major financial services firm spent six months and several hundred thousand dollars on a segmentation exercise that produced statistically perfect customer groups — and was then unusable because nobody could act on them. That's the segmentation trap: technically correct, practically useless. Here's why segmentation is not customer strategy, and what to build instead.
Untargeted cross-sell trains customers to ignore you. The next-logical-product approach picks the offer the customer is most likely to want next and times it well — and the conversion rate difference is dramatic. Here are four ways to determine the next logical product, from current-holdings analysis to lifecycle, life-stage and activity-based triggers.
Your customer loyalty survey is only as good as the list of attributes it asks about — miss the things that matter to customers and the data is quietly wrong. Here are three ways to build that "big list" properly, drawing on staff knowledge, desk research and customers themselves, so the survey collects feedback on what actually moves loyalty.
Customer service has shifted from a nice-to-have to a core deliverable in the past decade. Most organisations have the intent — they just haven't lined up the enablers that turn intent into consistent delivery. Here are the seven, and the one most teams quietly skip.
Customers don't mind giving feedback — they mind being asked badly, or too often. Most customer satisfaction surveys still trip over the same handful of basics, and the survey ends up costing more goodwill than it gathers data. Here are a dozen practical do's and don'ts that, applied together, lift response rates without changing the questions.
Online customer advisory panels are useful — fast feedback, large sample sizes — but the ones run by market research companies build a relationship with the researcher, not you. There's a more valuable version: a dedicated panel that belongs to your brand. Here's how one ran for an insurance client launching a new direct brand, and what it returned that an outsourced panel couldn't.