Tag: Customer Feedback

Zappos pizza deliveries, Nordstrom snow chains — the customer-service folklore is great theatre, but it's terrible strategy for most businesses. Inflated expectations are expensive to meet and impossible to sustain. Here's why those legendary stories aren't actually aimed at you, and what to deliver instead.

Customer service and customer retention get talked about as if they're the same thing. They aren't — but the link between them is more interesting than most CX talks make out. Here's a real story about a wedding, a Flight Centre travel agent, and three facts that explain why great service really does keep customers.

"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.

I've spent years telling people to ignore external NPS benchmarks. So when Bain's Rob Markey — the guy who literally wrote the book — pushed back, I expected an argument. We ended up in violent agreement. Here's the narrow set of cases where benchmarks actually do help.

"All you need are good people" is a comforting management myth — and it stops being true the moment your organisation gets complex. Beatrice Hofmeyr has been interviewing Australian executives about organisation design, and four insights stand out. Here's the guest post: where poor design breaks customer experience, why language matters, and the co-design move that lifts the odds of success.

"If you don't give us a 9 or 10 it means we have failed." That's score-begging at a hotel checkout, and it's the visible symptom of badly set frontline NPS targets. Skip the targets entirely and NPS gets treated as the soft metric. Here's how to give frontline staff NPS targets without breaking the survey — covering punitive use, gaming, data variability, and line of sight.