Customer experience strategy blog - NPS, customer loyalty, implmentation

August 19, 2018

Time to think about the plural of ‘anecdote’ in new ways

Maurice FitzGerald / Behavioral economics, Blog / Anecdotes, Famous quotes, science, Surveys, unstructured data /

Just a few thoughts based on hearing that “the plural of anecdote is not data” twice in the last week. Before digging into the origin of the saying, let me just say that I feel it is wrong. Sentences are data: unstructured data. Modern text analytics software allows us to transform a set of anecdotes […]

Elephant to illustrate confirmation bias

August 17, 2018

Avoiding confirmation bias when interpreting CX, NPS, indeed any research results

Maurice FitzGerald / Behavioral economics, Blog, NPS / MailChimp, Net Promoter System, NPS, response rates, SurveyMonkey, Surveys /

Some thoughts on how to avoid confirmation bias when interpreting research results. While I will use Net Promoter System research as an example, this applies to all forms of customer and other research. And… I will suggest how you can use cognitive biases to your advantage when presenting your results or persuading people to invest […]

August 3, 2018

Thoughts about survey infrastructure for Net Promoter and other feedback/improvement systems

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, NPS / MailChimp, Net Promoter System, NPS, response rates, SurveyMonkey, Surveys /

Unless yours is a very small company, you will not be able to implement and operate an effective Net Promoter System or any other feedback and improvement system without appropriate technology. To the extent possible, you should use Cloud-based (SaaS) solutions that do not require you to invest in hardware. Among other things, an advantage […]

July 16, 2018

The lower your prices, the happier your customers will be… right? (Not really!)

Maurice FitzGerald / Behavioral economics, Blog, Strategy / Behavioral economics, Customer Experience, Dan Ariely, HP, Pricing /

One personal story I found myself in charge of pricing software services for Europe at DEC. Customers had fewer problems with the more recent versions of our software, and we wanted them to update. First, we implemented a policy saying that once the software was two versions old, we would not support it anymore. That […]

July 2, 2018

Suggested method for choosing your strategy from a list of proposals

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Strategic initiatives, Strategy / decision-making, Decisions, Strategic initiatives, strategy /

Once you have a set of insights about customers, competitors, your industry, the external environment and you ability to implement, the next step is to decide what you are going to do about it. Ideally, the choices will be a collective proposal from the entire team that did the situation analysis. There is a human-nature […]

June 25, 2018

How demographics affect customer experience research – You should expect surprises

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, NPS, Strategy / Customer Experience, CX, Demographics, Net Promoter System, NPS, strategy, student survey, Surveys /

It is tempting to keep feedback requests very short to improve completion rates and avoid wasting customers’ time. However, I have yet to see research where demographics did not make a difference. Sometimes the differences are surprising. What we mean by ‘demographics’ Demographic information is that which you use to categorize responses. Of course you […]

June 12, 2018

Improving response rates to survey requests sent by email

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, NPS / Customer Experience, CX, email, NPS, response rates, Surveys /

Way back in October last year I blogged about using direct marketing techniques to improve response rates to surveys. (You can find that blog here.) I would like to add some points that are specifically about survey requests sent by email. Here are five things you can do, in priority sequence. If you have other […]

May 30, 2018

How I got my two biggest promotions: True Stories

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog / Francesco Serafini, Job interview, Promotion, Software /

I was speaking to a business school student recently. She asked me about how I managed to get promoted during my career. That got me thinking… Luck and hard work I retired two years ago. My most significant promotions were at Digital Equipment Corporation in 1989, and at HP in 2005. I attribute the first […]

May 14, 2018

A legendary Mark Hurd speech to HP employees in Israel

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Cost / Cost reduction, EDS, Mark Hurd, Oracle /

Mark Hurd is CEO of Oracle, and was CEO of HP before that. While at HP, he made many speeches about cost. His general philosophy was best illustrated by my favorite event, an all-employee meeting he hosted when visiting Israel. [Special request to those who have bought the print version of Customer-Centric Cost Reduction: Please read […]

May 1, 2018

The start of a long story: How I learned about ‘customer-centric cost reduction’.

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Cost, Cost reduction, Strategic initiatives, Strategy / Customer Experience, Net Promoter System, NPS, Relationships /

Such a contrast I was looking out my office window near Charles de Gaulle airport in 1982. The phone rang just as I was watching Concorde take off on its daily flight to New York. In hindsight, the contrast was complete. The roar of the afterburners was the symbol of no-expense-spared extravagance. The phone call […]