Customer Feedback Best Practices

US industry has spent USD 800 million a year on customer satisfaction for a decade, and the American Customer Satisfaction Index has barely moved. That's because satisfaction isn't the goal — loyalty is, and loyalty needs a different program. Here are the five steps to building a customer feedback program that actually moves the business, starting with linking loyalty to a financial outcome.

When a big B2B opportunity goes the other way, you've spent six to twenty-four months on it — and the cheapest way to learn is a win/loss interview. The questions you ask decide whether you get usable insight or just polite hindsight. Here are the 13 must-have questions, the ones to avoid, and where each fits in the interview flow.

Losing a big B2B deal is expensive — and it's also a teachable moment most sales teams skip. Win/loss interviews salvage real learning from the loss, but only if they're done as interviews not surveys, and by someone other than the rep who lost the deal. Here's the full process, with the rules that keep the interviews honest.

You've brainstormed, wordsmithed and polished the survey questions — but if you skip the TRACER check before you hit send, the survey will quietly under-deliver. TRACER (random sample, respect, actionable, clear, easy, relevant) is the six-attribute filter your survey must pass. Here's each attribute explained, with the most common ways surveys fail each one.

After 15 years of running customer feedback programs, we wanted to move past anecdote and see which attributes statistically predict success. So we surveyed 80 practitioners and ran the analysis. Here are the six drivers and seven key takeaways that came out — including the engagement and reporting moves that consistently separate the programs that stick from the ones that quietly stall.

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.