Most customer feedback programs launch with energy and quietly die between months 12 and 24. The six causes are predictable — lack of senior buy-in, no business linkage, siloed implementation, treating it as a project instead of a process — and each one is preventable if you spot it at the start. Here's the checklist.
I take pretty much every customer satisfaction survey I'm sent — it's a useful way to see what works and what to avoid. This is the first in a deconstruction series: a real survey from a web-hosting company, what they got right, and where it quietly fell over. Names removed; the lessons aren't.
An IT service delivery manager claimed his only measurement of customer experience was the ITIL service delivery process. That's a familiar mistake: confusing system-driven call-management metrics with the customer's actual experience. Here's where ITIL helps, where it's quietly blind, and how to layer customer feedback on top so you're tracking what customers care about — not just what's easy to measure.
Mystery shopping has been the standard "how are we doing at the front line" tool for decades. Transactional NPS surveys — practical only in the last few years — quietly do most of the same job for less cost, with the customer's actual voice. Here's the side-by-side, where mystery shopping still wins, and where transactional surveys clearly take over.
"How do we determine the value of NPS — in two sentences?" That's the question a customer's CFO asked when reviewing the investment in NPS data collection. The honest two-sentence answer needs three short logic links underneath it. Here they are, with a worked example using the customer lifetime value calculator.
The service recovery paradox — customers ending up more loyal after a problem than they would have been without one — is real, but not universal. It quietly fails for repeat failures, big failures and faults the customer thinks were avoidable. Here's when the paradox works, when it doesn't, and how to set up Transactional NPS to exploit it.