Strategies

Today's the day we get serious about customer feedback — heads nodding, actions allocated, everyone leaves enthused. Eighteen months later the same people are sitting around the same table, blaming the industry, the country, the customer base. The collapse follows the same five phases almost every time. Here's how to recognise each phase, and how to break the cycle.

Surveys are the default tool for understanding what customers think — and they have real disadvantages people forget to mention. After twenty years running customer and market research, here are ten advantages worth leaning into and the limitations worth designing around, so the survey earns its keep instead of just filling a reporting deck.

Customer feedback is usually pitched as a long-term lever for loyalty and retention — useful, but slow. There's also a short-term sales play hiding in the same data, and most teams aren't using it. This on-demand webinar walks through the three profit levers, the six things your survey must have, the four it must never have, and how to drive sales out of feedback this quarter.

Presenting negative customer feedback to executives, the room goes from agreeable nodding to defensive deflection at exactly the slide where specifics start showing. Defend, defer, deflect, deny — the four Ds. Until executives own the feedback, nothing changes. Here's how to get past the 4Ds, including the first-hand customer experience that does more than any chart.

From the outside, customer feedback and market research look like the same thing — surveys, analysis, charts to the executive. They aren't. One is operational management, the other is strategic exploration. Mix them up and the feedback program quietly stops driving change. Here's the distinction, laid out plainly enough to argue with your research vendor.

You're running transactional NPS, customer comments are pouring in, advocates are being identified — and you're doing nothing to turn them into sales. Day in, day out, customers are putting their hands up to recommend you, and you're not handing them the tools. Here are three concrete steps to convert advocates into revenue, starting now.