Newsletter

#43 – Industries that have no way to ‘delight’ us, NPS standards, and more

 

Welcome to the 43nd edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Are there entire industries where making customers happy is impossible?
  2. Does NPS need a single standard?
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites
  5. Looking forward
Are there entire industries where making customers happy is impossible?

While listening to a friend complain about his cable TV provider over the holidays, I asked myself whether cable TV companies can ever make customers happy. Perhaps their only opportunity is to make us unhappy. After all, if their service works perfectly, we don’t event think about it.

I think this ties into Frederick Herzberg’s two-factor theory of motivation. He studied workplace / job satisfaction and found that there is a set of factors that motivate us, and a non-overlapping set of factors that demotivate us. The demotivators are also called hygiene factors, which I have discussed in various blog posts and in our books. I now believe that the motivators and demotivators available to different companies are simply different. Specifically, some have lots of available motivators and others do not. Please take a look at the industries represented in the Temkin 2017 NPS benchmark results, shown below.

At the top of the graph, I feel car dealers, streaming media companies like Netflix, and computer / tablet manufacturers have far more opportunities to remember you and give you an excellent experience than, for example your electricity supplier, down at the bottom of the table. You only notice that you have an electricity supplier when you receive the bill or when it stops working.

Before my latest reflections, I used to believe that the bad performance of the companies at the bottom of the graph came exclusively from their monopoly or duopoly status in most markets. That still matters, but it is not the only factor.

What is the NPS ‘standard’?

I sent my team to Satmetrix NPS training a few years ago. I noticed that what they were taught was not the same as what Reichheld and Markey have documented in ‘The Ultimate Question 2.0’ and on the netpromotersystem.com website and podcasts. I speculate that the CXPA certification exam may have yet a third standard for NPS. Would anyone from CXPA or who has done the certification care to enlighten me?

An example may help clarify what I mean. Reichheld and Markey’s standard NPS survey has three questions (recommendation score, ‘Why?’, and ‘What could we do better?’). Satmetrix certification has or at least had two questions, and the second one is not simply ‘Why?’. What version is in the CXPA exam, assuming NPS is covered at all?

I could give many other examples, and will pick one. The overall Net Promoter System Framework taught by NICE/Satmetrix is not the same as the one on netpromotersystem.com.

Personally I feel a single standard is needed for a variety of reasons. Among others, it would allow software developers to be more consistent in what they propose, both for surveys and for anaytics. Your views are welcome. Please write to me at the address given at the bottom of this newsletter or open it and post a comment on our newsletter page at customerstrategy.net.

 

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image Journey mapping – The Main Customer Experience Measurement and Improvement Systems – Part 7

This is the final article in a series of seven about CX measurement and improvement systems. I hope you have enjoyed them, and that you learned at least a little.…
image The main customer experience measurement and improvement systems – Part 6 – Proprietary systems

Various consulting companies propose proprietary measurement systems. Your company may have its own composite metric too. The Temkin Group, for example, has both the Temkin Loyalty Index and the Temkin Experience Rating. They are useful examples…
image Most-read articles in 2017

A list of the five most popular articles on customerstrategy.net and the most popular article I wrote on LinkedIn in 2017. The LinkedIn article is not about customer experience, and is still worth a read, I think.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Speaking of cable TV – Comcast price gouging

Continuing the theme of companies that can only make us unhappy, this headline grabbed my attention: Comcast celebrates repeal of net neutrality by hiking prices in 2018. As you might expect, it is not totally accurate, though Comcast constantly raising prices for people who have few or no alternatives does seem to be real. (The inaccuracy here and in most media is that the Federal Communications Commission did not ‘repeal net neutrality’. They simply said they felt ISPs should be regulated by the Federal Trade Commission instead, as they should no longer be considered ‘common carriers’.) As I have written some time ago when discussing the EpiPen, price gouging often produces acts of revenge. I would condier this article to be an act of revenge. Revenge feels good in the short term, but generally has no real effect. (Epi Pen prices continue to rise.)

Forbes / Micah Solomon: How long will it take to develop a customer culture at my company?

Some good customer culture tips from Micah Solomon. Two of the four tips are about getting the right messages to new employees on their first day, or even earler. It is about a three-minute read here.

 

Looking forward

It is still January and there is still time to think about your professional goals for 2018. What about doing something for your customers? But what? Our books can help! Here are links to each on Amazon.com. If you use a different country site, you can just open the link, then edit .com to .co.uk, .de or whatever:

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

 

#42 – Customer Experience and Growth, and much more

 

Welcome to the 42nd edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Customer Experience as a growth initiative
  2. Relationship between NPS trends and market share / growth
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – Fred Reichheld, Jared M. Spool
  5. Looking forward
Positioning Customer Experience as a growth initiative

Over my 40-year career I learned something critical about how company leaders view different types of work. I believe I can summarize it simply:

People who drive growth are perceived as geniuses. Everyone else is simply doing their job.

I spent the first four years of my career as an industrial engineer with the parent company of Wrangler jeans. We were measured on producing cost reductions that were at least a particular multiple of our salaries. Then I moved to the sales subsidiarey for France, Italy and the Benelux, based in Paris. What a change! In black-and-white terms, I discovered that nobody cared about cost. All that mattered was growth. If you worked on growth, you got the salary increases and bonuses. I quickly managed to position myself in the middle of the development of stonewashing, our most important growth area. $$$ followed, well, French Francs anyway.

With Digital Equipment Corporation, I was the business leader in charge of handling an anti-trust case brought against us by the European Commission. We were threatened with a $1.3 billion fine for alleged anti-competitive practices in our hardware services business. When I was put in charge, the advice I was given by the lead lawyer on the case was “Just try to settle it all for $100 million.” I had a different point of view. It took almost two years, but we managed to settle the case with the Commission for $0. When the time came for my annual review a few months later, I expected big bucks. My boss, the head of our business in Europe just gave me an average increase. When I expressed suprise, he told me “You just did your job.” That’s when I truly understood what I have written in italics above.

If you lead customer experience work, you have a choice to make. You can position your work as driving growth or as avoiding loss. Your work on customer loyalty can be positioned as ‘less customers leaving’ or as ‘more customers staying’. The latter is what you want. If your work is successful, renewal and upsell rates will be higher than their historical averages. If you work in software, activation rates will be higher. Position this work as a corporate growth initiative! Write the corresponding announcement for your CEO. Work with whoever is communicating the top five growth iniatives for your company to ensure customer experience improvement is one of them.

Let me give you one last analogy. We customer experience professionals feel proud of, and make a lot of noise about our ability to ‘put out fires’. But think about it; city fire departments who put out fires don’t get big rewards. They are just doing their jobs. Architects who design new buildings and lead the construction projects are the ones who get the big bucks. And they don’t even risk their lives. It may not be fair, but that is the reality.

So, that is my suggestion for your customer experience New Year’s resolution. Your work has to be communicated as being about growth, not cost. Happy New Year!

Relationship between NPS trends and growth

I continue to read articles that use anecdotal evidence to dispute the science behind the Net Promoter Score. I would like to clarify what Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey have to say about the subject. Their research showed that NPS trends predicted between 20 and 60% of market share / growth trends, depending on the industry. The relationship is strongest in mature industries, where there are many players, and where it is reasonably easy to switch providers.

This seems logical to me. One notable study that claims that NPS is relatively useless includes Norwegian retail gasoline sales as an example of the non-relationship between NPS and growth. However, during the three years studied, Statoil was the only retail gasoline chain in Norway, and the price of a barrel of oil dropped 30% in the second year. This is a great example of where you would not expect any customer experience metric to have predictive value.

You can the relevant information from Reichheld and Markey here.

 

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image The main customer experience measurement and improvement systems – Part 6 – Proprietary systems

Various consulting companies propose proprietary measurement systems. Your company may have its own composite metric too. The Temkin Group, for example, has both the Temkin Loyalty Index and the Temkin Experience Rating. They are useful examples…
image Most-read articles in 2017

A list of the five most popular articles on customerstrategy.net and the most popular article I wrote on LinkedIn in 2017. The LinkedIn article is not about customer experience, and is still worth a read, I think.
image The main customer experience measurement and improvement systems – Part 5 – The Wallet Allocation Rule

Authors Keiningham, Aksoy, Williams and Buoye describe the system in the book of the same name. Its focus is a composite metric should provide good predictions of revenue trends for companies, at least for large companies that have a good choice of suppliers.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

LinkedIn article by Fred Reichheld – What’s in a name?

In this article, Fred talks about the different names he has seen in use for the Net Promoter Score® and why they may make sense for you and for your company. However, the phrase that caught my attention was “…but with Net Promoter, perhaps the most important thing we are tracking is whether a life has been enriched.”

He also provides useful clarifications about the Net Promoter categories. Well worth a read here.

 Silliness – Jared M. Spool on the Net Promoter Score

I get the dubious privilege of reading quite a lot of silliness about customer experience in general, and about the Net Promoter System in particular. Such posts usually have two characteristics. First, they are often written by people who have not read either Reichheld’s original HBR article on the subject or The Ultimate Question 2.0, and have not learned about updates to the system by listening to the Net Promoter System podcast or reading books such as our own. The second characteristic is that they tend to have an academic background and will not accept pushback that unless it is in the form of an article in a peer-reviewed academic journal.

Jared M. Spool has both of these characteristics. Nonetheless, what he has written is worth reading. Perhaps not for the reasons he intends, but as a perfect illustration of pseudoscience. His main argument in his latest article is that since his personal experience of recommending companies differs from the (non-peer reviewed) research done by Reichheld and Satmetrix for the HBR paper, that research is worthless. This is what I call the fallacy of “My anecdote trumps your science.” You can read what I am talking about here.

 

Looking forward

It is time for all those New Year’s resolutions. What about your customers and a resolution to make their lives better? Our books can help! Here are links to each on Amazon.com. If you use a different country site, you can just open the link, then edit .com to .co.uk, .de or whatever:

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

 

#41 – Cultural differences, hospitals, CX measurement and improvement, more

 

Welcome to the 41st edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Net Promoter System podcast on cultural differences
  2. Customer experience research in hospitals
  3. Latest blog posts – Customer experience measurement and improvement systems
  4. Notable items from other sites
  5. Looking forward
Net Promoter System podcast on cultural differences

If you work for a multinational company, you have probably seen all sorts of performance comparisons between countries. Gross margin differences by country may well be meaningful. Customer experience score comparisons are generally not. Or at least, they should be used with great caution. That is the main subject Rob Markey and I cover in the latest Net Promoter System podcast.

We cover examples from a retail chain that is present in major cities, the IT hardware and software industries, and retail banking. Are the Japanese, Australians, Koreans and Dutch just a bunch of grumpy people, or is something else happening?

We also cover some aspects of communicating data and recommendations across different companies and cultures. Personally, I found this part quite entertaining. The whole podcast lasts less than 20 minutes. Please let us know what you think. You can find it in iTunes, Stitcher or on the Bain website here.

Customer experience research in hospitals

Someone I know had hip replacement surgery recently. It was her second hip replacement at the same hospital. When she left the hospital the first time, she was given a satisfaction survey. She was asked to rate various aspects of the care, from the way she was greeted at the reception desk onwards. I suppose you could call it typical customer journey research. Her first operation was about nine months ago. At no point since then did the hospital’s customer research people ask her (1) how functional her hip now is or (2) whether or not she was happy to have had the operation. From the customer / patient’s perspective, these are the outcomes that matter. The particular hospital is not an exception. Healthcare research seems to concentrate on giving scores to each department, rather than on patient outcomes.

I have to say that I am not surprised by such ‘hospital-centricity’. Way back when I was doing my Industrial Engineering degree, one of my classmates had a sort of internship with the Accident and Emergency unit of the main hospital in Galway. I think this was in 1976. His mission was to improve the efficiency of the operation, and ideally to reduce patient waiting times. This was a typical IE project, involving Operations Research and queueing theory. All such models require a financial value to be put on the time of the various people involved. The problem that was hardest to solve was that the head of the service categorically refused to put a non-zero value on patients’ waiting time. Ever since then, lack of patient-centricity in hospitals has never been a surprise.

 

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. The three below are part of a series of seven I am planning on the main customer experience measurement and improvement systems. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image The main customer experience measurement and improvement systems – Part 4 – The Net Promoter System®

Fred Reichheld wrote his landmark article The One Number You Need to Grow and published it in the Harvard Business Review in December 2003. That article was the origin of the most popular customer experience measurement and improvement system on the planet…
image The main customer experience measurement and improvement systems – Part 3 – Customer Effort Score The Customer Effort Score is the metric described in the excellent book The Effortless Experience by Dixon, Toman and Delisi. The primary focus is service-center work and the associated metrics.…
image The main customer experience measurement and improvement systems – Part 2 – CSAT / Customer Satisfaction When you are asked to rate your ‘overall satisfaction’ with something, you have entered the Customer Satisfaction rating system. It is a metric, rather than a system, and different companies do it in different ways. As a metric, it is by far the most common one we see. Read on to learn about its advantages and disadvantages.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Technology Services Industry Association: Maintenance and Support Revenue Waterfall

It is important to position customer experience work as a growth initiative in addition to the more obvious problem-solving role. The best way I have seen of doing so for many businesses is to concentrate on renwal and upsell rates for existing customers. While the TSIA infographic in this blog post does not directly mention CX, it shows how to position it. After all, if your work is successful, renewal and upsell rates should improve. This may be easier to demonstrate in large companies where improvements may be implemented in one part of the business, but not another. I am planning to write about this subject in more detail soon. In the meantime, this TSIA blog post from 2015 should help.

 CMSWire: Why Customer Focus Eludes so many

This short article by Bill Davis of Tata Consultancy Services caught my attention because of Bill’s focus on the disconnect between listening and acting on the feedback. See what you think here.

 

Looking forward

It is winter in this part of the world, and time for outdoor activities in the snow. Breaks for students in our families mean that my brother and I will probably be less active than ususal for the next couple of weeks. We continue to do our best to persuade people that our books are great end-of-year gifts for friends, colleagues and teams. (There is still time to get the print versions delivered in many countries, and of course Kindle delivery is instantaneous.) As always, Amazon reviews are the way you can help us most, so please do that, no matter what you think of our books. Here are links to each on Amazon.com. If you use a different country site, you can just open the link, then edit .com to .co.uk, .de or whatever:

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

 

#40 Dunning-Kruger Effect and Customer Experience

 

Welcome to the 40th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. The Dunning-Kruger effect and customer experience
  2. Data collection for my annual report on customer versus employee satisfaction
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – Great infographics from Temkin
  5. Looking forward
The Dunning-Kruger Effect and customer experience

When someone asks me “What do our customers want?”, I tend to answer “I don’t know. We should ask them.” My reaction dates from my first experience asking Wrangler customers in Paris what they wanted, way back in 1981. My corporate manager, in Greensboro NC, told me he already knew what our customers wanted, and that I should not do the interviews I planned with the main boutiques around Paris. He was wrong. We got major surprises.

A few years ago, I had the rare privilege of visiting the Chinese cities of Jinan and Jining for my job. They are in Shandong provice, not far from Qufu, where Confucius was born. One of his quotes could be the original version of the Dunning-Kruger effect: “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” Confucius was 2,500 years ahead of social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who managed to prove that Confucius was right. In short, people performing badly at certain tests believe they perform really well, while those doing really well tend to underestimate their performance. Dunning and Kruger posit that this is true in all domains. You can get a quick overview of their work in this Wikipedia article.

Here are examples of where you see the effect in customer experience work:

  • Your leaders affirm that you have ‘industry-leading customer satisfaction’, and have no competitive research that backs this up.
  • Your company publicly says it has ‘an NPS of 92, compared to an industry average of 40’. This is a real example. The 92 was from a small survey of call center users. The 40 was from a properly-done competitive benchmark study. This is an ‘appples and oranges’ comparison.
  • Anecdotes are used to represent reality. I suggest doing searches on terms like “Delta’s disasterous customer service” or the same for American Airlines, or indeed for airlines in general. A few viral videos of people being ejected from overbooked flights or other bad experiences seem to allow journalists to say airline service is awful without anyone questioning it. In fact, customer satisfaction with airlines serving US consumers has never been better. Here is a link to the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index data for airlines, from now back to 1995. When I brought this up to a journalist who had written the opposite, he replied that the ACSI data was ‘obviously wrong’. Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is pervasive and there is little you can do about it. CX leaders need to assume it exists, and continue their ongoing education on the science of listening to customers and driving improvements. Not everyone is scientifically literate, so success can only be partial. Like life, it’s a journey.

Data collection for my annual report on customer vs. employee satisfaction

Among the most read articles I have ever written are two on the relationship between employee and customer happiness. In short, my research showed that there is no relationship between the two in general, and that this also holds true for most individual industries. Since I have to assume there is a time lag between employee happiness trends and customer happiness, I have just completed the data collection on employee satisfaction. I should have the final customer data in March, I hope. My employee satisfaction data covers 350 companies and the scores have changed by less than one percent, year over year. For the first half of the year, customer satisfaction has improved slightly for the same companies, and it will be interesting to see the full year results and trends. Here is a link to what I wrote on the subject in January.

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. The most recent is the second in a set of seven articles I am planning on the main customer experience measurement and improvement systems. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image The main customer experience measurement and improvement systems – Part 3 – Customer Effort Score The Customer Effort Score is the metric described in the excellent book The Effortless Experience by Dixon, Toman and Delisi. The primary focus is service-center work and the associated metrics.…
image The main customer experience measurement and improvement systems – Part 2 – CSAT / Customer Satisfaction When you are asked to rate your ‘overall satisfaction’ with something, you have entered the Customer Satisfaction rating system. It is a metric, rather than a system, and different companies do it in different ways. As a metric, it is by far the most common one we see. Read on to learn about its advantages and disadvantages.
image The main customer experience measurement and improvement systems – Part 1 – Smiley Buttons There are quite a number of customer experience measurement and improvement systems in use around the world. They are not all equal. This post is the first in a series of seven articles about the main systems.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Bruce Temkin: Great collection of infographics

I am sure I am not alone in liking infographics, at least as things to post on office or cubicle walls. Bruce Temkin and his team have published quite a few over the last year. Click here to be taken to a LinkedIn page where you can download each individually or the whole collection as a collage.

 

Looking forward

My brother and I are doing our best to persuade people that our books are great end-of-year gifts for friends, colleagues and teams. (Hint, hint!) As always, Amazon reviews are the way you can help us most, so please do that, no matter what you think of our books. Here are links to each on Amazon.com. If you use a different country site, you can just open the link, then edit .com to .co.uk, .de or whatever:

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

 

#39 – Net Promoter for People, irritating surveys, customer culture, customer lifetime value

 

Welcome to the 39th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. New podcast on ‘Net Promoter for People’
  2. Another irritating survey
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites
  5. Looking forward

New podcast on ‘Net Promoter for People’

Many companies, and I suppose all large companies, run annual employee surveys. The process usually runs something like this:

  • The CEO announces the annual survey and how important it is, committing to drive improvements based on the research.
  • The survey is open for two or three weeks, to ensure that people who are on vacation get a chance to respond.
  • Particularly for large companies using external survey vendors, the analysis and benchmarking of the results takes time, often several months.
  • Since most research uses large numbers of questions with rating scales, but no input on why the ratings were given, companies find out that particular things have bad ratings, but don’t know why. They then form focus groups of just a few people who decide why the particular rating was so low an what should be done about it. This takes time, and may not reflect the reasoning of the larger population. And of course, the fact that one of the 80 question son the list had a low rating does not make that question important.
  • Reporting out on the results is sometimes delayed to avoid communication conflicts with quarterly financial resporting.

The result of all this is often improvement initiatves that employees do not recognize as relevant, announced so long after the survey itself that employees feel the company does not care. And that’s the ‘best case scenario’. Senior leaders are also known to say “Ah yes, there was that thing going at at the time of the survey that makes your proposal irrelevant. Let’s wait to see whether employees say the same thing next year.”

The new Net Promoter for People is designed to address many of these concerns. It has been covered by Bain’s Darci Darnell in the latest Net Promoter System podcast. It adds an additional rating question the standard three-question NPS format. The new question is ‘To what extent do you agree with the following statement: I am inspired by my job.” The standard questions are the NPS ‘How likely are you to recommend [your company] as a place to workl?’, ‘Why?’ and ‘What could we do better?’ The Bain research shows that verbatim comments relating to recommendation are mainly about basic needs and things about which they are dissatisfied. The inspiration question produces verbatim responses that are about their higher-level need and suggestions for a positive future. I consider the podcast to be essential listening. You can find it here.

Yet another irritating survey

I have been in Los Angeles this week, attending the Bain Net Promoter Forum. I had to transit via Zurich, and got a pop-up survey request as soon as I logged into the Wifi in the Swiss lounge there. As I usually do, I tried to decide what I wanted to say before starting the survey. There were 34 questions in the survey, plus demographic questions. I could not really say what I wanted. It was clear that the survey is designed primarily to give scores to each of their own departments, rather than to find out what the customers want.

I suppose I should write this one up in more detail. Why can’t companies just stick to a three-question NPS format or something similar? The Swiss people used the recommendation rating question, but did not follow it with ‘Why?’ and ‘What should we improve’ questions. I just can’t understand this sort of thing. Why would you need anything more? If people don’t make any comments or suggestions about the reception area, it just does not matter.

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. The most recent is the secondin a set of seven articles I am planning on the main customer experience measurement and improvement systems. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image The main customer experience measurement and improvement systems – Part 2 – CSAT / Customer Satisfaction

When you are asked to rate your ‘overall satisfaction’ with something, you have entered the Customer Satisfaction rating system. It is a metric, rather than a system, and different companies do it in different ways. As a metric, it is by far the most common one we see. Read on to learn about its advantages and disadvantages.
image The main customer experience measurement and improvement systems – Part 1 – Smiley Buttons

There are quite a number of customer experience measurement and improvement systems in use around the world. They are not all equal. This post is the first in a series of seven articles about the main systems.
image What B2B customers and resellers want – A perspective that goes beyond research

While I have been pushing a scientific approach to building and implementing a customer experience strategy for a long time, let’s put that aside for a moment. After working on customer experience since 1981, here are some things I believe B2B customers want, and that you won’t discover directly from your customer research.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Wownow: CX Framework Series #6 – Customer-centric culture

Far be it from me to say that my way of thinking is the only one that matters. Rosaria Cirillo Louwman has designed an overall customer experience framework that includes six disciplines. This final blog in a series of six in the framework covers a set of interesting suggestions about how to establish a more customer-centric culture in your organization. Personally, I think culture is the hardest thing to change, because it requires so many soft skills and so much consistency. I think you will find it a useful read here. She has also recorded a TEDx talk that you can find on the Wownow site.

CMO Australia: Why so many organisations keep getting NPS wrong

Excellent article in which Brian Andrews of Medallia talks about his extensive experience leading NPS implementation over a long period. He led the first major NPS implementation, which was at Intuit in 2003, and is now ‘Senior CX Principal’ at Medallia. The points I like best in the article are about tying the NPS results to revenue.

Customer Lifetime Value is the terminology I use for this. As Brian points out, it is useless to develop a model for this in isolation. Your CFO or her delegate must design the model with you. Once your company has an agreed model for how much one point of client retention is worth over time, it becomes far easier to decide on investments necessary to drive that improvement. You can find the article here.

Looking forward

We have had our first sales of the new book of Peter’s drawings, so thank you for that. As always, Amazon reviews are the way you can help us most, so please do that, no matter what you think of our books.

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

 

#38 – New book, Identifiable Enemies, Ethics, Quality Customer Service

 

Welcome to the 38th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. New book: “So Happy Here” – The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business
  2. Thoughts about the importance of identifiable enemies 
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites
  5. Looking forward

“So Happy Here” – The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business

The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed a change to the header of this newsletter and on our website. Yes, my brother and I have collaborated to bring out a book of his business cartoons. You will have seen most of them in our previous books, blog posts, LinkedIn articles and tweets.

There are three versions in all. The Kindle version is available from all Amazon stores worldwide. There are both color and black & white versions of the paperback book. By the time you read this, the paperbacks should be available from the Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.it, Amazon.es and Amazon.co.jp stores. (All versions, and indeed all of our books are great end-of-year presents for your colleagues and teams.) 

Peter combines his artistic skills with the odd way of thinking he learned while doing his Doctorate in Cognitive Psychology at Oxford. The result is a set of cartoon-style drawings with a weird sense of humor. As I speak to book and blog readers, I learn that different people have different favorites. Mine is probably the one of the company CEO announcing major cost-saving cuts to employees by video link from his private jet. (Don’t do this.) I have added some text to indicate context and learning points for each drawing. As always, your feedback is welcome. Peter can be reached at pfg@customerstrategy.net.

Thoughts about the importance of choosing identifiable enemies

Business strategy is all about winning. Winning means winning against someone. Any good business leader needs to be clear about this, and needs to communicate who the enemy is. And that enemy has to make emotional sense to his or her audience.

I have been thinking about this during the recent debates about Glyphosate / Roundup in the European Union and here in Switzerland. The main argument being used against Glyphosate is its appearance on the IARC (a World Health Organization subset) list of ‘probably cancer-causing substances’. Being the curious type, I decided to seek out the list to find out what else is on it. The list is here. Please open it, then scroll down past the list of ‘Substances’ (including Glyphosate) to reach the section called ‘Mixtures’. Read carefully. Do you see what I see?

Why is Glyphosate the only item that attracts demonstrations in the street? Why do other items on the list, such as ‘Red meat’ and wood used for home heating not attract the same passionate demands for total bans? I think it is because red meat and heating wood are not attractive identifiable enemies. ‘Big Pharma‘ is, and Monsanto is, for some reason. ‘Big Red Meat‘ or ‘Big Heating Wood‘ could not possibly attract the same attention. Based on the logic for a Roundup ban, they should. What do you think? And how do you think this should affect your corporate choice of the evil enemy you need to portray to your employees?

 

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. The most recent is the first in a set of seven articles I am planning on the main customer experience measurement and improvement systems. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image The main customer experience measurement and improvement systems – Part 1 – Smiley Buttons

There are quite a number of customer experience measurement and improvement systems in use around the world. They are not all equal. This post is the first in a series of seven articles about the main systems.
image What B2B customers and resellers want – A perspective that goes beyond research

While I have been pushing a scientific approach to building and implementing a customer experience strategy for a long time, let’s put that aside for a moment. After working on customer experience since 1981, here are some things I believe B2B customers want, and that you won’t discover directly from your customer research.
image OK, so I have my NPS or CSAT score. Is it good or bad?

The short answer is… it depends. It is difficult to interpret a first score, but it can be done. Read on for more

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Entrepreneur Magazine: The 6 Keys to Quality Customer Service

Nice article by Nathan Resnick on how to give good service. I have to say that I particularly like his first and fourth points. The first is about delivering the basics. The fourth is about reducing the effort customers have to exert to get what they need.

When you open the web page, you will need to click on ‘Start Slideshow’ to see the full article. You can read it here.

The Behavioral Scientist’s Ethics Checklist

Regular readers and book readers will know that my brother and I are huge fans of behavioral economics; the science that combines economics with behavioral psychology. They way experimenters perform experiments has been the subject of a number of ethics debates. I feel several of the points raised in this in-depth article are relevant to customer research too. The six points covered include data privacy and opt-out policies, among others.

Somewhat ironically, the behavioral science website itself does not seem to respect these ethics guidelines. They do track your clicks without asking for your consent, and there is no confidentiality policy that I can find. (We do not track what you do on our site.) Nonetheless, I recommend taking five minutes or so to read the article. You can find it here.

 

Looking forward

Based (so far) on a single request, Peter is going to find a way to produce signed prints of any drawings may like to have in your office or at home.

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

 

#37 New NPS Podcast, Communication tips, new cartoon book

 

Welcome to the 37th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. New Net Promoter System Podcast – Rallying teams around Net Promoter
  2. Some interesting lessons for presenting over the phone 
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – Forrester and Blake Morgan
  5. Looking forward – New book!

New Net Promoter System Podcast – Rallying teams around Net Promoter

I believe this was my sixth podcast with Rob Markey of Bain. It is shorter than many of the others, at just over 20 minutes, and I think you will like it.

We cover questions people have asked and provide advice about how to engage upwards and downwards. By this I mean engaging everyone in an organization, from senior leaders to front-line employees. It’s difficult and few companies do it well.

Here is how we summarized it on the website: “Building internal support for a fledgling Net Promoter System can be one of the biggest challenges of getting such an effort off the ground. It requires leaders to not only have a strong grasp of loyalty economics and the company’s strategy, but the softer skills necessary to inspire and teach employees to do the right thing for customers.” You can find the podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, as well as on the Net Promoter System Podcast website here. 

Some interesting lessons in presenting over the phone

I presented at an Association for Service Managers event in Germany last week. There were about fifty people in the room. One of the other presenters (Mike FitzGerald – no relation mikefitzger@gmail.com) gave a one-hour session on advanced presentation skills. I have attended a number of such courses over the years, and learned some new things this time.

Among many other things, Mike provided useful tips for presenting over the phone, when nobody can see you. I have already put them into practice, and feel they are making a difference. Of course, I can’t work out how to test this scientifically. Ideas welcome.

The two things I retained were (1) to sit at the edge of my seat during a call. First it makes me more attentive, and second, my voice is less relaxed than if I were just leaning back in my chair. (2) I now feel free to walk around, gesticulate and otherwise perform as though I were in front of an audience. I tried this in a call yesterday, and felt full of energy. I hope that energy came across at the other end. Anyway, if you try either of these, please let me know what you think. Other tips for teleconferences are welcome too. The main thing I do other than writing is one-hour coaching sessions over the phone, to teams and individuals.

 

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image What B2B customers and resellers want – A perspective that goes beyond research

While I have been pushing a scientific approach to building and implementing a customer experience strategy for a long time, let’s put that aside for a moment. After working on customer experience since 1981, here are some things I believe B2B customers want, and that you won’t discover directly from your customer research.
image OK, so I have my NPS or CSAT score. Is it good or bad?

The short answer is… it depends. It is difficult to interpret a first score, but it can be done. Read on for more
image Behavioral Economics and Smoking for 11-year-olds

A story about how an innovative teacher effectively stopped my junior high school class wanting to smoke. I still shudder when I remember it…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Forrester: CX Quality Worsened in 2017

BForrester publishes a customer experience index for a variety of countries. The overal report for the USA came out recently. They cover 314 brands, and twice as many declined since 2016 as gained.

For details, they invite you to sign up for a free on-demand webinar. You can read the summary here.

Blake Morgan: The difference between customer experience and user experience

Blake Morgan is a popular blogger, writer, and speaker. In this short article, she clarifies the difference between customer experience and user experience. I am surprised how often the two terms are confused, and find Blake’s explanation to be both clear and simple. You can find it here.

 

Looking forward

My brother (Peter) has decided to publish a book of business drawings that includes what he has prepared for our three books and for a number of my blog posts. I expect the book to go live on Amazon within the next three days. This, and of course all of our books are great presents for your teams or yourselves, for Sinterklaas, Christmas, Chanukah, New Year’s Day… (The drawing below is about the dangers of centralizing some procurement work, but not all. All drawings are commented and given context in the book.)

Centralizing procurement

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

 

#36 – Career Advice, and is my new NPS or CSAT metric any good?

 

Welcome to the 36th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Unexpectedly popular career advice post on LinkedIn
  2. So, I have my first NPS or CSAT score. Is it a good score? 
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – Provide Support Infographic and Quora.com
  5. Looking forward

Unexpectedly popular career advice post on LinkedIn

I had someting on my mind after talking to a few former colleagues recently. Since it was not strictly about customer experience, I chose not to write about it on my own blog, but to post it on LinkedIn instead. My own daughters are at university, and I suppose I was thinking of them too. I feel quite strongly about this career advice. About 1400 people have read it on LinkedIn up to now. And some people disagree with me, as can been seen in the comments.

The core advice in the article is as follows: Don’t work for a company whose entire business is cost reduction. Their reduction business model will include reducing you. The working atmosphere is depressing as you are constantly surrounded by people being fired, buildings being closed, and other cost-cutting negativity.

You might think I am talking only about outsourcing, and outsourcing companies are the extreme examples. The advice applies to any type of outsourcing, meaning any business where a client’s work is moved to another company that promises to do that work at lower cost. As I have written in Customer-Centric Cost Reduction, this can be great news for the client companies. They are able to reduce costs in areas that their customers don’t care about, so they can invest more in things that will make a difference. However, it is not great news for the employees of the outsourcing companies. After all, they are the ones that have to do the same work at 20% lower cost. Not fun. You can read more and read about the exception to the general rule on LinkedIn here. 

So I have my first NPS or CSAT score. Is it any good?

I have been busy doing some research for a client this week. It looks like we will get a survey response rate between 30 and 40%, so I am optimistic it will both representative and useful. In any case, there are already lots of improvement suggestions.

Since it is the first time such a survey has been carried out, I am certain the client will want to know whether the resulting Net Promoter Score is good or bad when I present the results next Wednesday. The simple-ish answer is that I don’t know, and that it does not really matter. What matters are the improvement suggestions and what is done with them.

A single NPS number is meaningless in isolation. If you are fortunate enough to have a benchmark study for your type of comany or organization, you are in luck. Otherwise, you just can’t tell, as you have no point of reference. What I will be suggesting is to repeat the research after implementing the first few improvement suggestions. The trend will be useul, and will indicate whether the changes have made a difference. It is a complex subject, so I decided to blog about it. You will find the post at the top of the blog list in the next section.

 

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts, including the one just mentioned above. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image OK, so I have my NPS or CSAT score. Is it good or bad?

The short answer is… it depends. It is difficult to interpret a first score, but it can be done. Read on for more
image Behavioral Economics and Smoking for 11-year-olds

A story about how an innovative teacher effectively stopped my junior high school class wanting to smoke. I still shudder when I remember it…
image Here is how to avoid getting a ‘Yes’ for your project, but without the people and other resources you need…

It’s probably one of the worst possible situations to be in. You prepare for days, weeks or months. You make a fabulous project proposal to your leadership team. You get approval for the project, but did not quite manage to get approval for the resources you need to be successful. Here are suggestions about how to avoid it.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Provide Support Blog: Infographic with ‘Top 15 mistakes made by customer service pros’

Beautifully-made infographic with a list of 15 mistakes made by customer service professionals. The focus is on mistakes agents make while interacting with customers on the phone or by other means. It is a good list. I am sure you will be able to think of other items too.

When I think about the subject, I jump straight to what I wrote at the end of Customer Experience Strategy – Design and Implementation. The main thing most customers want is to be remembered. In the call center environment, this includes knowing whether a customer has called before, not asking them to repeat information multiple times when they are passed to different agents, and (probably the most difficult) understanding whether the customer has already tried to resolve the issue by a different means. See what you think of the infographic on the Provide Support Blog site.

Quora.com can be useful

Following the issues with the now-defunct Net Promoter System Forum in LinkedIn, I was looking for other ways to interact with customer experience and Net Promoter System professionals. I found Quora, and it is quite useful. The general rule in Quora is that you have to ask a question. As you might expect, most questions are being asked by people who immediately provide what they believe to be the best answer. However, there are lots of good exceptions and I have found some deep discussions in the Net Promoter System area here and in the Customer Experience area here. Enjoy.

 

Looking forward

On top of thinking about re-doing our website, I am thinking about re-writing the Wikipedia entry on the Net Promoter System. While anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry, I have found it suprisingly difficult to avoid having my changes deleted by others who disagree with them. Have a look at the page, and please let me know if you have improvement suggestions.

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

 

#35 – Podcast on gaming of surveys, emotion rules, and more

 

Welcome to the 35th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. New Net Promoter System podcast: Games People Play
  2. Thank you for the kind feedback on the last two blog posts 
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – Freakonomics, and CX Talks
  5. Looking forward

Net Promoter System Podcast – ‘Games People Play’

The latest in a series of podcasts I recorded with Rob Markey of Bain has been released. I think the subject is the one that attracted the most questions when I used to manage the Net Promoter System Forum on LinkedIn: gaming of customer research.

As soon as you start to measure individuals on scores, or simply put too much pressure on improving a number, people will find ways to cheat. (If you really want to cheat, I blogged about how to do it back in February.) The secret to success is making it clear in your communication and reward system that you value the projects and process improvements that result in better customer experience more than the scores.

The podcast starts with the reasons for gaming and how to avoid it. It goes on to cover examples Rob and I have seen of how people have cheated their company’s systems. When the podcast was edited back, one of my own stories was removed. Here it is. We had some clever call center agents who noticed that they had full access to customer data in their call management system. They decided to use the capability by editing the customers’ email addresses, replacing them with email accounts they had set up for themselves. They then responded for the customers, giving themselves amazing compliments. We fired them, of course. The new podcast is here.

Thank you for the feedback on my last two blog posts

I suppose my most recent blog posts have taken a more personal tone than older ones. I relate things that have happened to me personally.

Several people emailed me about the last one, asking for more details about what happened in the showers after gym class in Seattle when I was 11. Seriously people, that is not the point of the story. The story was about how the school took an approach to smoking prevention that got me emotionally, rather than just burying us in facts. I went on to recommend taking the combined emotion / fact approach when communicating about cusotmer experience.

The prior post was about how to deal with the common situation where your project is approved, but not the people and other resources you need to be successful. That’s a tough one. I suggest ways of making your proposal that ensure you don’t fall into the trap. And yes, I was a slow learner and fell into the trap several times.

 

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts, including the two mentioned above. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image Behavioral Economics and Smoking for 11-year-olds

A story about how an innovative teacher effectively stopped my junior high school class wanting to smoke. I still shudder when I remember it…
image Here is how to avoid getting a ‘Yes’ for your project, but without the people and other resources you need…

It’s probably one of the worst possible situations to be in. You prepare for days, weeks or months. You make a fabulous project proposal to your leadership team. You get approval for the project, but did not quite manage to get approval for the resources you need to be successful. Here are suggestions about how to avoid it.
image You don’t need a customer experience strategy – You already know what to do (A modern fairy tale for CX day)

Don’t bother wasting time developing a customer experience strategy. You already know what to do! Well, most of us think we do. Including me. We all have lots of ideas…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman speaks during a Freakonomics podcast

Regular readers know I am a fan of behavioral economics in general, and of Daniel Kahneman in particular. (If you have never read any behavioral economics books, I suggest starting with Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational before moving on to Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, then finishing with Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge.) The Freakonomics podcast covered a conference organized by the Behavior Change for Good project.

While the whole podcast is worth a listen, I suggest jumping directly to 30 minutes and 45 seconds where Daniel Kahneman will start to explain what he considers to be the greatest lesson in psychology he has ever learned. Please listen to it, then ask yourself why your company and perhaps your customers are not already behaving the way you want them to. The podcast is here, and of course on iTunes and other podcast platforms.

CX Talks – The Effectly Blog

Joakim Thörn of Swedish company Effectly sent me links to several of these CX talks. I suggest starting with the one about outside-in versus inside-out thinking, then move on to the one about how ‘Emotions matter’. You can find the talks here.

 

Looking forward

Yes, October was indeed our record book sales month, as predicted. Thank you for that. Now we are thinking about re-doing our website to focus more on the books and the blog. I think I need a seriously rainy day to get my motivation going, and we just have not had those recently.

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

 

#34 Fairy Tale reactions, customers just want to be remembered

 

Welcome to the 34th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Reactions to the ‘Modern Day Fairy Tale’.
  2. Customers want to be remembered 
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites
  5. Looking forward

Reactions to the ‘Modern Day Fairy Tale’

Thank you for the many reactions I received on my ‘fairy tale‘ about strategy development. Several people told me they appreciated the Beatles references, though only one person correctly guessed where it was all going before the final blog post. One email was particularly entertaining. Here is what Vijay Nagasubramanian told me:

“That was fantastic ‘paperback writing‘. When I started readying your more than elaborate blog ‘yesterday‘, I got a feeling I was on some ‘long and winding road‘. Nice sketch by Peter FitzGerald. Everyone portrayed in the sketch seems to be saying ‘I am the walrus‘.

To start the customer experience day celebrations, I landed at my customer’s office this morning. The HPE theme for this year’s celebration is Customer First, and true to that, my customer and I decided to ‘come together‘. It was nice to pick his brains on his take on customer experience and the things I heard from him and you are valid ‘eight days a week‘. With the kind of start we had celebrating CX day, ‘I feel fine‘! Happy Customer Experience day to everyone ‘across the universe‘.”

Customers just want to be remembered

I regularly say that I think the most important thing I have learned about customer experience over the years is simply that customers want to be remembered. I had two experiences in the last week that reminded me of that point.

I had lunch with one of my daughters in Lausanne. It was an unusual burger place. I had never been, but she has been there several times. My burger was great. She ordered a vegan burger. We both then ordered coffee. As often happens in Switzerland, our coffees came with a little chocolate. Hers was a dark chocolate, and mine was a milk chocolate. She quickly said “Hmm, I wonder whether they brought me the (vegan) dark chocolate because I chose a burger that happened to be vegan.” I said “Wow, that would be great customer insight.” We were quickly disappointed by the arrival of normal milk for the coffee, rather than her being offered the choice of soy milk (which they had). So close.

At my own end, I had the experience of Amazon not remembering its customers. Any of you who have Kindle hardware or software may have noticed that there is a ‘Look Inside’ feature on Amazon’s website for Kindle books. You can look at the first ten or so pages of a book. Amazon changed the software they use for the ‘Look Inside’ feature some months ago, but did not tell authors they had done so. The new software does not respect the CSS style sheet functionality used by the .mobi and .epub formats they accept for Kindle books. The books still work perfectly, but the Look Inside loses almost all of its formatting, probably for about half of all books. This had been happening for three or more months before I noticed. I had to log a case, and they fixed the previews instantly. It should be obvious that they should have written to their tens of thousands of authors to advise them of the change and what to do. They still have not done so. Disappointing.

 

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image Use direct marketing techniques to improve survey response rates

Like most people, I receive lots of survey requests by email. Unlike most people, I don’t just delete them all. I want to learn. What I usually learn is that many people sending surveys don’t know the basics about how to get decent response rates.
image Can you cut your way to greatness? Yes, providing you only mean great for shareholders

As a retired HP person, I have been reflecting on ‘cutting your way to greatness’. There are not too many examples of success. Let’s look at Yahoo, then go on to understand the situation more generally.
image You don’t need a customer experience strategy – You already know what to do (A modern fairy tale for CX day)

Don’t bother wasting time developing a customer experience strategy. You already know what to do! Well, most of us think we do. Including me. We all have lots of ideas…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Post-truth alternative facts article: Three reasons big airlines’ service is awful

The normally quite intelligent Mark LaScola wrote this disappointingly unscientific piece for the Observer. I highlight it because it demonstrates how persuasive emotional content can be. It starts “Frequent flyers know airline service is a shell of its former glory.” Mark is based in the USA. The first sentence is the closest he comes to supplying any data.

In fact, the opposite of what he says is true for US airlines. I am not making this up. The American Customer Satisfaction Index has never been higher for airlines as a whole. The three largest US airlines all have the best scores they have had in the last 20 years. The data is here. Unfortunately, the Observer website provides no way of commenting on articles, and the contact form on Mark’s own website does not currently work. He may actually believe what he is saying. I am disappointed he is spreading misinformation to others, based on anecdotes and what he has read online. This a great example of what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 (intuitive / emotional) thinking versus System 2 (rational) thinking. You can find the article here.

Uproxx: These Customer Service Fails Will Horrify You

OK, it’s schadenfreude time. These examples of bad customer service are so awful they are almost funny. Enjoy them (sort of) here.

 

Looking forward

My experiments with Amazon Ads are continuing, and October looks like being our record sales month for all three books. It is too soon to know whether that is just a coincidence. As I said two weeks ago, the temptation to stop experimenting is powerful, and I must resist it… In the meantime, we could really use more Amazon reviews. So… no matter what you thought of our books, please share your views with others.

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

 

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