Customer experience strategy blog - NPS, customer loyalty, implmentation

November 20, 2018

Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Part 2: Partners

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Strategic initiatives, Strategy / Chief Customer Officer, Customer Experience, CX, strategy /

The majority of companies have partners for at least some of their business. The three main categories of partners available to most businesses are resellers, implementation partners, and subcontractors. The purpose of any and all business strategies is to crush your competitors and win. Your partners can help you do that. But how? And what […]

November 15, 2018

Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Part 1: Customers

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Strategic initiatives, Strategy / Chief Customer Officer, Customer Experience, CX, strategy /

Way back in 2005 I had the privilege of attending an executive education program at Columbia called Creating Breakthrough Strategy. The course was far more practical than the other attendees and I expected. The reason was simple: the main content and structure were provided by Willie Pietersen, a South African who has been CEO of a […]

November 8, 2018

Invisible gorillas prove you need automated text analytics. Seriously! (7-minute read and videos about inattentional blindness)

Maurice FitzGerald / Behavioral economics, Blog, Cognition, Psychology, Strategy / Behavioral economics, Cognition, Customer Experience, text analytics /

We are awful at observation. Our brains just don’t work all that well. Various psychological experiments lead to the inevitable conclusion that our brains work hard to fit whatever we perceive into known, existing categories. The part of this phenomenon that I want to cover here is called ‘inattentional blindness’. But what has this got […]

October 24, 2018

Tips for communicating the purpose of cost reduction (7-minute read)

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Cost, Cost reduction, Strategic initiatives, Strategy / Behavioral economics, Cost, cost cutting, Cost reduction, Customer Experience, profit /

I was talking to a former colleague yesterday. He described a recent meeting where he learned that major cost cutting still continues where we used to work. The discussion made me want to share what follows. I have seen cost cuts communicated well (which is rare) and poorly (which is the rule, rather than the […]

October 11, 2018

When should you ask for customer feedback? And should you survey customers at all? (5-minute read)

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, NPS, Strategic initiatives, Strategy / Chief Customer Officer, CSAT, Customer Experience, CX, Net Promoter System, NPS, Surveys /

I have a sort of hobby: answering companies’ requests for my feedback and seeing whether they will write back to tell me what they have learned and what they are going to do. I suppose I have responded to about 20 such requests over the last two months, and then heard nothing at all back, […]

October 3, 2018

Contra Revenue: Could it be your easiest way to improve profit margins? (5-minute read)

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Cost, Cost reduction, Strategic initiatives, Strategy / Cost, cost cutting, Cost reduction, Customer Experience, profit /

On the general subject of ‘customer-centric cost reduction’ I would like to discuss an area that many medium to large companies do not examine at all, and the rest do not cover deeply enough. Contra revenue is not in your P&L or in your Balance Sheet. It therefore receives little attention in most companies. After […]

September 24, 2018

Start-ups: Thoughts about implementing the Net Promoter System (3-minute read)

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, NPS / CSAT, Customer Experience, Customer Success, Geoffrey Moore, Net Promoter System, NPS, Outer Loop, Start-ups, Surveys /

Let’s face it; most start-ups fail. Some fail because they think they are doing what customers want, but they are simply wrong. Some fail for other reasons. All of these are very small companies, or at least they start very small. And in the case of technology, I think they all face a specific challenge… […]

September 3, 2018

The Outer Loop of the Net Promoter System® (5-minute read)

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, NPS / CSAT, Customer Experience, Customer Success, Net Promoter System, NPS, Outer Loop, Surveys /

The Outer Loop is where generic, systematic improvement opportunities get addressed. There are two types of Outer Loop activities: The first are those that can be addressed within a single team or function. For example, if your French customers consistently tell you they do not want service center people to use their first names when […]

August 29, 2018

The Inner Loop of the Net Promoter System® (5-minute read)

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, NPS / CSAT, Customer Experience, Customer Success, Inner Loop, Net Promoter System, NPS, Surveys /

Your research process produces feedback that individual employees and teams need to understand and react to. Let’s consider the simplest and most common use of the Inner Loop: ‘episode’ research. A customer has a query of some sort and wants it resolved. Let’s suppose they have filed an insurance claim. An agent in your team […]

August 25, 2018

The heart of the Net Promoter System (1-minute read)

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, NPS / Customer Experience, Net Promoter System, NPS /

While it is unfortunately the only part of the system that many companies use, the NPS numbers don’t matter all that much. What matters is what you do with what you have learned. The heart of the Net Promoter System lies in the three processes that support feedback, learning and improvement. They are shown above. […]