Newsletter

#13 Surveys that add no value, ‘Answers month’ in the NPS Forum

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Welcome to the 13th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Reflections on answering surveys and never hearing anything back
  2. Progress with Net Promoter® System (NPS) Forum on LinkedIn
  3. Latest blog posts, including the customer-employee love-hate matrix
  4. Notable items from other sites
  5. Looking forward

Surveys that add no value

I received yet another email from a company reminding me to respond to a survey this morning. It was their second reminder. I normally do my best to respond to surveys, just for the learning experience. Not this time. I have been reflecting on why and feel my thoughts may help some of you. The reminder came from British Airways and is signed by James Hillier, who has no job title.

Whether positive, neutral, or negative, your feedback is welcome and highly valued, as it will help us to shape our products and services in the future, and understand what our most valuable customers need from us.

James also wrote to me in September. I took the survey. While they said it would take just 15 minutes, there were 134 screens asking for input. Yes, I counted them. I gave specific and detailed input to the few open questions asked. I heard nothing back from them. Nothing at all. I have no idea what they learned from the survey. Certainly, none of the improvement suggestions I made have been implemented. The survey is administered by KPMG Nunwood, who sell their own customer experience improvement methodologies to companies like BA, notably an approach called ‘Six Pillars’ that involves lots of data collection.

As far as I am concerned, the long survey back in September was an insulting waste of time. The lack of any follow-up made me less loyal to British Airways, and unwilling to take a new survey. That is a rare situation for me, so please take note. The fundamental principle of all customer research is that it must provide more value to the customer than to your company. If you never tell customers what you have learned and what you are doing with their suggestions, you violate that principle. So, if you only want a metric, or if you have no budget for follow-up or to implement improvement suggestions, you should not do the research in the first place.

Last week’s employee/customer satisfaction blog post was popular

More people read what I write on the relationship betwee customer and employee satisfaction than on any other subject. I got lots of useful input when I posted on LinkedIn too. This is why I chose to send you the latest post directly yesterday. It is a follow-on that provides lists of the companies that combine the best and worst of customer and employee satisfaction. Personally, I found it surprising. I hope you enjoyed the ‘Customer-employee love-hate matrix’. One reader I spoke to yesterday made a suggestion that I should also examine the difference between product and service companies, and I intend to do so soon.

April is ‘Answers month’ in the Net Promoter® System (NPS) Forum on LinkedIn

I have lined up various experts to answer any and all questions you may have about NPS during April. If you are not one of the 23,000 current group members, please join the group and the discussion. You do need to ask to be a member, and I always approve such requests within 24 hours. Instant responses are not always possible as I have to sleep sometime. You can find the LinkedIn group here.

Our latest blog posts Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.

image Introducing the Customer-Employee Love-Hate Matrix for the 31 Best and Worst Large Businesses

Introducing the ‘Customer-Employee Love-Hate Matrix’, shown above Following on from last week’s post Proof there is no relationship between employee and customer satisfaction, I would like to provide the ‘love-hate…
image Proof there is no relationship between employee and customer satisfaction
Many will find this surprising. I used publicly-available data to prove the absence of a relationship between employee and customer happiness for 336 large businesses selling to American consumers. Personally, I don’t find this surprising at all. Read on to understand why.
How to calculate the lifetime value of a customer
Calculating the lifetime value of a customer is somewhat like calculating the value of a company you would like to acquire. While you can find many methods of doing the calculation, only one is completely correct. There are also a number of satisfactory approximations…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Forbes: Can You Handle Dimension Data’s Uncomfortable Truth About Customer Experience?

This article by Adrian Swinscoe contains more statistics and percentages than I normally like to see, but its message is clear: There is a huge gap between what companies say they want to do about customer experience and what they actually do. You can find the article here.

CallidusCloud CX: Improving the Survey Responder Experience

Annette Franz is a writer worth following. This time she has written a guest piece for CallidusCloud CX. Her clear short messages cover things like survey design and ensuring you are addressing the right audience. More critically, she advises readers to act and to evolve. Her article is here.

Our books are now available

Our thanks go out to the many who have bought the Kindle versions of our books. are available, and We expect the print versions to be avaailable before the end of this month. The most helpful thing anyone can now do is to review the books, no matter what you think of them. Reviews will help us to improve as we finalize the print versions. The images above are linked to the US Amazon site. You can find links to the major Amazon stores on our books page, here.

Thanks for reading. Please share with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for the newsletter 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.

 

#12 Customer vs. employee happiness, NPS Forum

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Welcome to the 12th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Proof there is no general relationship between employee and customer satisfaction
  2. Progress with Net Promoter® System (NPS) Forum on LinkedIn
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites
  5. Our books are available as of today!

 

Employee and customer satisfaction

As promised last week, I have refreshed my January study on the relationship between employee and customer satisfaction. The scope is 366 large companies selling to American consumers. Back in January, I was missing the 2016 customer satisfaction data for 71 companies. I now have that, and have replaced the 2015 numbers for the relevant companies. In January, I was able to show that there was only a small relationship between employee and customer satisfaction. I can now go further and say that there is no relationship at all, on average across all 366 companies. Bear in mind that employee satisfaction and employee engagement are two different concepts, as I explain in this week’s blog post. I am sure you will find the research as surprising as I did. Feedback welcome. The link to the study is in the blog section below.

Progress with the Net Promoter® System (NPS) Forum on LinkedIn

I got a surprise a week ago when I learned I was the new manager of the 23,000-member NPS group on LinkedIn. What I discovered surprised me, and not in a good way. The group had not been actively managed for years. Over a thousand posts were in the moderation queue. Several hundred membership requests had never been approved. The group rules were unclear, to say the least.

After taking a few days to clean up the mess, I sent a message to all members announcing the ‘re-birth’ of the group. I posted new purpose statements and new group rules that will be enforced from Friday. The group is now designed to be a place where NPS practitioners can learn, share and innovate. The Net Promoter System has evolved in the years since The Ultimate Question 2.0 was written, and it will continue to evolve. I hope that this community will be an innovation hot spot. You can find the LinkedIn group here.

Our latest blog posts Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.

image Proof there is no relationship between employee and customer satisfaction
Many will find this surprising. I used publicly-available data to prove the absence of a relationship between employee and customer happiness for 336 large businesses selling to American consumers. Personally, I don’t find this surprising at all. Read on to understand why.
How to calculate the lifetime value of a customer
Calculating the lifetime value of a customer is somewhat like calculating the value of a company you would like to acquire. While you can find many methods of doing the calculation, only one is completely correct. There are also a number of satisfactory approximations…
image How to evaluate customer survey text analysis software
Customer research of all types can be divided into two categories: rating questions and open questions. You are dealing with rating questions when you are asked to provide a number on a scale as an answer to a question. Open questions let you say whatever you want. The software challenge is then how to analyze all of those responses without human bias…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

McKinsey: Putting Customer Experience at the Heart of Next-Generation Operating Models

Thanks to Ricardo Gulko for suggesting this article on the McKinsey consultants’ website. There is a lot of good content here. The main insights I took away came from the examples about speed. An insurance startup that processes client claims “within seconds” is an example. The article reinforces my view that cost reduction and customer satisfaction can be compatible. Making processes simpler and more effective for customers often costs less. The article is by Shital Chheda, Ewan Duncan, and Stefan Roggenhofer. You can find it here.

Humor: The customer is apparently not always right

Some funny customer stories from this website I had not seen before. All of the humor I have seen there so far is ‘clean’ and suitable for sharing with others. The site is here.

Our books are now available

The Kindle versions of our books are available as of today (as of midnight local time Thursday) on all Amazon sites worldwide. Anyone who pre-ordered should see them arrive automatically in their Kindle libraries. They are also in the Kindle LendingLibrary, meaning they are free for Amazon Prime customers who participate in that program. We decided to go exclusively with Amazon for eBooks, so you will not be able to find them anywhere else. For those new to Kindle, you don’t have to have a Kindle device. Free Kindle applications exist for iOS, Android, PC and Mac. Print versions will follow in April.

The most helpful thing anyone can now do is to review the books, no matter what you think of them. Reviews will help us to improve as we finalize the print versions in the coming weeks. Any resulting eBook updates should be delivered to you automatically, without any further charge. The images above are linked to the US Amazon site. You can find links to the major Amazon stores on our books page, here.

Thanks for reading. Please share with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for the newsletter 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.

 

#11 Customer Lifetime Value, Customer Culture

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Welcome to the 11th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Changes to the NPS Forum on LinkedIn
  2. Lifetime value of a customer
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites
  5. Looking forward

The NPS Forum on LinkedIn

The largest Net Promoter System group on the web is the 22,800-member ‘NPS Forum’ on LinkedIn. I noticed that its owners had not posted anything in the last couple of years and seemed to have lost interest. I asked them to make me an administrator of the group. That has now been done, as of this morning. The group is here. I would welcome your advice on how to make it into an interesting place for people to learn about NPS and share their experience. I will probably make the first changes next week, based on whatever input I have by Monday.

Lifetime value of a customer

No matter what customer experience improvement system you use, knowing how much a customer is worth to you is important. With the exception of companies that only have a small number of large customers, doing P&L accounting by customer is rare. It is also quite hard to do accurately, as whatever method you use to allocate overheads by customer is somewhat arbitrary. Your finance leader is a critical ally in the work.

Lifetime value calculations are easiest for businesses that depend on renewal of annual contracts. You can use past renewal rates to predict the future. Renewal rates depend on how much the customer likes you, of course. There may also be money-losing contracts that you would rather not renew. I cover a variety of such concepts in my latest blog post: How to calculate the lifetime value of a customer. Link below.

Our latest blog posts Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.

How to calculate the lifetime value of a customer
Calculating the lifetime value of a customer is somewhat like calculating the value of a company you would like to acquire. While you can find many methods of doing the calculation, only one is completely correct. There are also a number of satisfactory approximations…
image How to evaluate customer survey text analysis software
Customer research of all types can be divided into two categories: rating questions and open questions. You are dealing with rating questions when you are asked to provide a number on a scale as an answer to a question. Open questions let you say whatever you want. The software challenge is then how to analyze all of those responses without human bias…
image
Cost reduction communication mistakes I have seen
This post covers several examples of major communication mistakes I have seen. Managers generally don’t like talking about reductions, and do quite a poor job. Leaders get things done mainly by what we say and what we write. Your audience reacts emotionally, rather than rationally to cost reduction announcements. Read these examples. If they make you squirm a little, I will have been successful.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Posts by Adrian Swinscoe

I have been reading more and more of what Adrian writes for Forbes and on his own blog. I have written about customer culture in the past, and that is one of his focus areas. His article How Middle Managers Can Boost Employee Engagement and Customer Experience is a good read and one of his most popular. Adrian says one of his favorite articles is How The Customer Experience Vision Gap Is Holding Many Organizations Back. Once again, it is mainly about corporate culture. Apparently, Peter Drucker did not actually say “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, but the sentiment is still a good one. If you like what Adrian Swinscoe writes, his blog is here.

The 25 Worst Customer Service Stories To Train The Best Customer Service Reps

I wish I could say I did not laugh at a lot of these, but I did. My apologies. The article from Kate Nasser is here.

Looking forward


Our books will actually be released a week from today. The Kindle versions are available now for pre-order on all Amazon sites worldwide. Clicking on each of the cover images will take you to their Amazon.com page. Our ‘Books’ page has links to other Amazon sites. Peter and I are feeling pretty good about them at this point, and working on their promotion. Print versions will follow in April.

The other thing that will be ready a week from today is the long-awaited final version of my study on the relationship between customer and employee satisfaction. You may recall that no 2016 American Customer Satisfaction Index numbers were available for 71 of the 340 companies covered. I now have all 71 missing numbers and am updating the study. At first glance, the numbers appear to be even more surprising than last time. More next Thursday, when the data crunching and triple validation is complete.

Thanks for reading. Please share with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for the newsletter 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.

 

#10 Special ‘Babies’ edition

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Welcome to this special ‘pink’ edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. The ‘triplets’ have arrived!
  2. Passing the project sponsorship pregnancy test
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites
  5. Looking forward

 View this email online

The ‘triplets’ have arrived

I am  delighted to be able to announce that the Kindle versions of all three of our books are now available for pre-order in all Amazon stores worldwide. The print versions will follow in April. I have been working with a professional editor over the last few weeks to finalize them. I have had to remain in a zen state when being given hundreds of improvement suggestions like “That caption needs to be moved up 2 mm,” “You have used your commas inconsistently in these three paragraphs,” “This drawing needs to be more centered and the text needs to be a bit larger and slightly more to the left.” Has it been worth the effort? Readers will be the judges. The book descriptions and links to the main Amazon stores are here. And here is my brother and co-author’s view on the subject:

Passing the project management ‘pregnancy test’

The circumstances remind me of what I call the project management pregnancy test. The test is simple: if your first major deliverable is more than nine months away, don’t bother starting: you are not pregnant!

So many things can change in nine months. In a professional environment, there are sure to be changes around you. If your manager’s manager changes, will you still have the sponsorship needed to complete your work? If the company has a bad quarter, will you lose your funding? Indeed, I believe you need to be able to show progress that is worth the effort every three months, maximum. In the case of writing books, having a plan and demonstrating progress is necessary to keep the support of your family and friends. I started writing on July 1st last year, so am just scraping in under the nine month limit. I had completed the first draft of my first book after three months. Peter’s amazing drawings started to make a real difference then. The text for all three books was complete after six months. I was able to maintain my own enthusiasm, and continue to work on the books two to four hours a day, every day. And it is not over. Now I need to persuade people they are worth reading


Our latest blog posts
Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.

image How to evaluate customer survey text analysis software Customer research of all types can be divided into two categories: rating questions and open questions. You are dealing with rating questions when you are asked to provide a number on a scale as an answer to a question. Open questions let you say whatever you want. The software challenge is then how to analyze all of those responses without human bias…
image Cost reduction communication mistakes I have seen This post covers several examples of major communication mistakes I have seen. Managers generally don’t like talking about reductions, and do quite a poor job. Leaders get things done mainly by what we say and what we write. Your audience reacts emotionally, rather than rationally to cost reduction announcements. Read these examples. If they make you squirm a little, I will have been successful.
image Customer-centric Cost Reduction and ‘Hygiene Factors Today’s post is a follow-on to my introduction to the concept of customer-centric cost reduction, back in January. You may recall that it is about how you achieve necessary cost…


Notable customer experience items from other sites

Etuma: Guide to selecting the correct method and tool for feedback text analysis

A six-step guide that will help you understand whether text analytics are needed, and if so, what type of tool to use. Step 6 is the actual ‘choosing’ step, and it includes 12 selection criteria. Yes, there is a bit of a theme in what I have been writing about last week and this week. I believe that understanding what customers need requires you to ask them open questions. Analyzing the responses is difficult and time consuming. Humans can’t deal with the volumes that all but the smallest companies can generate. Last week I mentioned a great white paper by Thematic. This week continues the theme with a complementary set of views from Etuma. While no author is listed, I presume the main article is by Matti Airas, while the 12 selection criteria are by David Grimes. The article is here.

Cheatsheet.com: Five companies that people hate calling

Historic monopoly and near monopoly situations cause horrible customer experiences. Why bother spending money on making customers happy if they have no choice but to buy from you? Cable TV companies and Internet Service Providers seem to come at the bottom of most lists, including the Temkin NPS benchmarks and the American Customer Satisfaction Index. The Per.Ceptive Australian benchmarks say the same thing. There are therefore no great surprises in this new US list here.


Looking forward

Now that the Kindle versions of our three books are available to order, my brother and I are concentrating on two things. The first is spreading the word. We need your help for this, both during the two-week pre-order period and thereafter, when we will need reviews. The second is the work we have to start on the print versions. Kindles use very simple formatting, without any choice of fonts or graphics formats, for example. We need to work out the precise look we want for the print versions. At least all the writing is complete.

Thanks for reading. Please share with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for the newsletter 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.

 

#9 Communication errors, ‘Alternative facts’ and business strategy

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Newsletter

Welcome to my latest newsletter covering customer experience and customer-centric business strategy. The five topics this week are:

  1. Communication errors
  2. ‘Post-truth’, ‘Alternative facts’ and business strategy
  3. Science-based management
  4. Recent blog posts.
  5. Articles on text analytics and humor in support that I find interesting.

 View this email online

Communication errors

It is amazing how often even simple communication goes wrong. As my former colleague Santiago Cortes used to say “Communication is something that happens at the receiving end.” What we think we are saying is not what is heard. When Mark Hurd was CEO of HP, he spoke about one aspect of this in particular. He wanted to invest loads of money in hiring new sales people. He liked to say “The first rule of selling is that you have to show up.” Of course we had to find the money for this somewhere, and we did it through massive cost cuts outside sales. Mark said that he found it was difficult to impossible to combine messages about cuts and about growth in the same speech. When both received equal time, audiences only remembered hearing about the cuts.

That particular phenomenon comes from what behavioral economists call loss aversion. We are really averse to losing whatever we currently have. Remember this when you have to talk about reductions. This is of course only one potential area where you can mess up. My latest blog post mentions others. 

‘Post-truth’, ‘Alternative facts’ and business strategy

I am an engineer and think of myself in the general category of ‘scientist’. This give me unrealistic expectations for business discussions. In essence, when someone says this or that business strategy, marketing promotion or (and this is where I am going) customer experience improvement method is worthless, I expect them to provide some sort of evidence. I should know better. To use an analogy mentioned on a satirical web page, why bother attending medical school when you can be a fully-qualified Google Medical Doctor in just a few minutes.

My extensive reading of behavioral economics should have prepared me for what I read regularly. Some things are not surprising, such as the incorrect belief that happy employees are essential for the creation of happy customers. Others surprise me more. About once a week I read that there is no scientific basis for the Net Promoter System. In each case, it is clear that the person making the statement has not read The Ultimate Question 2.0 or the research Forrester, Temkin and others have published on the same subject. Rather than taking a day to read, they have taken a minute to make up their own minds. And since it is easy to find Google search results that agree with this (or anything else you want to believe), they rush into print. 

It is true that the best way of getting attention in the thousands of channels of information available to us is to take an extreme or unexpected position on something. I observe that when people take a position that has no supporting evidence, and evidence of the opposite is shown to them, many still persist in the same beliefs. Think about it this way: based on an average population, about a quarter of the people reading this believe acupuncture works, despite over a thousand double-blind studies that prove that inserting needles randomly produces exactly the same placebo effect. The same people probably believe it is about 3,000 years old, when the technology to make the needles has only existed for about 80 years. (It was all about ‘bloodletting’ before that.) None of this evidence seems to matter. The emotional belief remains.

It is the same in business strategy and customer experience strategy. There are strategy and customer experience creation and implementation methods that have been proven to work. I promote them, based on years of study, research and experience. That is what you will find in my blog posts and books. Yes, it will always be easy to find Google search results that contradict my methods. That does not make the search results right.

Our latest blog posts

Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.

image Cost reduction communication mistakes I have seen

This post covers several examples of major communication mistakes I have seen. Managers generally don’t like talking about reductions, and do quite a poor job. Leaders get things done mainly by what we say and what we write. Your audience reacts emotionally, rather than rationally to cost reduction announcements. Read these examples. If they make you squirm a little, I will have been successful.
image Customer-centric Cost Reduction and ‘Hygiene Factors

Today’s post is a follow-on to my introduction to the concept of customer-centric cost reduction, back in January. You may recall that it is about how you achieve necessary cost…
image Customer research confusion reduction – There are six types of customer surveys

There is quite a lot of confusion about which types of customer research are useful for predicting revenue, and which serve more general purposes. No matter what type of research…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Thematic: Reliable and Scalable Analysis of Net Promoter Score Verbatims

A deep and brilliant white paper from the Thematic software team. As some readers know, Thematic is the best software I have seen for analyzing NPS verbatim responses. (I have no personal connection or financial interest in Thematic, so feel I am a neutral judge.) The new white paper goes into detail about how it works and why it works so well. It is all about Natural Language Processing algorithms. When you sign up to receive the white paper by email, you will see an offer from Alyona Medelyan and her team to provide you free test analysis of your own verbatim answers. They have done so for me, with great results. I admire the work that Paul Astle of Shopdirect.com has done with SAS software on their huge volumes of responses, and want to mention that I have no personal experience with SAS, so can’t compare it. You can find the Thematic white paper download page here.

Forbes: How To Provide Witty And Effective Customer Support On Social Media

Jimmy Rohampton wrote this short and entertaining piece on the use of humor in customer support. While humor is something that does not cross borders well, particularly the border that is the Atlantic Ocean, I found the examples useful. Use with care. I suppose the light tone counterbalances the somewhat negative items at the start of this week’s newsletter. You can find the article here.

Looking forward

I confirm that my brother and I have now completed all editing and illustration work for the Kindle versions of our three books. I am now targeting March 15th for making them available for pre-order in most Amazon stores worldwide. My generally paranoid nature means that I expect them to be actually deliverable a week to ten days later. I will provide an update on that next week. The print versions will probably take a further week or two to be available.

Thanks for reading. Please share with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for the newsletter 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.

 

#8 Keeping things simple, six signs a company does not care about customer service

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NewsletterWelcome to my latest newsletter covering customer experience and customer-centric business strategy. The four topics this week are:

  1. Customer-centric cost reduction, keeping things simple
  2. Recent blog posts.
  3. Two relevant Forbes articles.
  4. Book publishing status.

 View this email online

The concept of customer-centric cost reduction

I first posted on this subject back in January. Clicking on the drawing on the right will take you there. The subject is dear to my heart. When I hear about companies who need to reduce cost, I always fear that a desire for ‘fairness’ will mean that customers will lose out. It is all too easy for a CEO to say “We need to reduce our costs by 20%. To be fair to everyone, I am giving all managers a 20% cost target.” Sounds fair, right? The issue is that it is not fair to customers. Customers don’t care what your office supplies cost, but they do care whether you deliver as promised. ‘Peanut-buttering’ cost targets means your performance on things that matter to customers will be affected. Then you will need to go through your next round of reductions, which I call the ‘corporate death spiral’. A better approach is possible. That is the subject of the article I posted earlier today.

January 17th blog post

image

Keeping things as simple as possible

Yesterday morning I read yet another proposal for a complex customer satisfaction index that a company in the financial services software industry has implemented. (Since someone from that company receives this newsletter and I don’t want to embarrass him, I am not going to provide a link, or name the company.) No less than 30 individual metrics are aggregated to come up with their Customer Health Index. Their marketing manager announced it with the headline NPS is Dead!

I have worked on customer experience, off and on, for over 35 years. This is by far the most complex metric I have ever seen. Some composite customer satisfaction indices, such as Bruce Temkin’s, combine three or four metrics and are better revenue predictors than a single metric. This new Customer Health index includes things like ‘$ partner co-sell’ and ‘number of closed won opportunities’ in the mix. It seems like an excellent sales management dashboard, and it may well predict the probability of the company closing the next deal, but it has little to do with customer experience. There is nothing about what customers want to see improved, for example. 

Composite metrics all suffer from one defect compared to NPS, whatever their benefits. They are much harder to communicate clearly and effectively. If you have to spend the first ten minutes of every presentation explaining how the metric works and why you chose a particular set of components, you are doomed. Keep customer experience metrics simple. Use Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, or something else that uses a single question and whose trend relative to the competition predicts revenue for your business. And of course, remember that the metric is less important than understanding why customers gave you the score, and what they want you to improve.

Our latest blog posts

Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.

image Customer-centric Cost Reduction and ‘Hygiene Factors
Today’s post is a follow-on to my introduction to the concept of customer-centric cost reduction, back in January. You may recall that it is about how you achieve necessary cost…
image Customer research confusion reduction – There are six types of customer surveys
There is quite a lot of confusion about which types of customer research are useful for predicting revenue, and which serve more general purposes. No matter what type of research…
image Behavioral Economics and Customer Experience – Part 2 – Price Gouging and Revenge
Price gouging – a particularly insidious move The New York Attorney General has launched an investigation into Mylan Pharmaceuticals, the maker of EpiPens. An EpiPen is used to provide life-saving…


Notable customer experience items from other sites

Forbes article: Six Unmistakable Signs a Company Doesn’t Care about Customer Service

I normally find myself agreeing with Micah Solomon. Not so much this time. He provides six useful illustrations of symptoms. I believe the single most important one is far bigger and easier to spot. Companies that consider that customer service is not a core competency or critical to their business subcontract it to someone else. I have to say that my views on this particular point are well known. I believe that bad customer service can be a reason for customers to leave a company. I also believe that there is little value in providing ‘great’ service, compared to ‘good’ service, for most companies. Investment money is usually better spent elsewhere, once the customer service is good enough. Once the processes are good enough, you can consider transferring it all, including the people, to a company that is specialized in that sort of thing. Micah Solomon’s article is here.

Forbes again: Happy Employees Equal Happy Customers? Well, Yes, But It’s Complicated

(No, Forbes is not all I read.) Given my own meta study, I could not resist reading this article written by Rodd Wagner. While overstating, as usual, the relationship between the two factors, they provide interesting data from BI International suggesting that unhappy employees may not cause unhappy customers. “Sabotage is rare” is one notable statement. The three graphs are quite easy to misinterpret. Bear in mind that the measurements are relative, rather than absolute, as you look at them. The article is here.

Looking forward

On the book front, my brother and I continue to make progress, slightly delayed by my first strategy work for a new client this week. I am reasonably close to getting all Kindle devices to display the text and graphics the way I want. I have also decided to go ahead with print versions. My best current guess is that the Kindle versions will be available for pre-order within two weeks, and actually deliverable a week or so later. I suspect the print versions will take a further week or so. I have not yet gotten to grips with the graphic format required for print. And my current plan is that both electronic and print versions will be available on all Amazon sites.

Thanks for reading. Please share with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for the newsletter here. I have put cleaned-up 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.

#7 More customer-centric culture, facts useless for changing minds

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Welcome to my seventh newsletter covering customer experience and customer-centric business strategy. The four topics this week are:

  1. Latest posts, other thoughts
  2. Highlights from my own blog.
  3. Notable customer experience items from other sites.
  4. Looking forward

View this email online

Most popular post so far – customer and employee satisfaction

My most popular blog post so far, by a factor of 3x, compared to the second on, is what I wrote on the non-relationship between employee and customer satisfaction. Several people have asked when I will update it with the last of the 2016 American Customer Satisfaction Index data. They only seem to provide updates quarterly, so my best guess is that I will be able to produce the final report the first week of April.

More thoughts on establishing a customer-centric culture

An email from a former colleague made me think of the manager we shared when I worked for Compaq. Tom Iannotti was a passionate Yankees fan and led Compaq Global Services in EMEA at the time. He was passionate about a number of other things too, both in his business and private lives. His passions seemed to have one thing in common. He was always interested in short-term results. Indeed, when he was briefly put in charge of strategy for Compaq Global Services at worldwide level he told me “They must be trying to persuade me that long-term thinking means more than next month.”

I was managing alliances when he became my boss. Like customer experience and indeed marketing, alliances produce their results in the medium term. Tom’s words to me were “I don’t like the answer you give me when I ask how much revenue your work will bring in this quarter.” I realized I had to change jobs to maintain his support. I moved to do service delivery strategy for the following couple of years.

The point of this story is simple. Sometimes your leadership just does not support things that only provide benefits in the medium term. If you are trying to start up a customer experience function and find yourself in this situation, you really need to change jobs or companies. It is not possible to succeed without the support of both your manager and their manager.

Our latest blog posts

Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.

image Customer research confusion reduction – There are six types of customer surveys
There is quite a lot of confusion about which types of customer research are useful for predicting revenue, and which serve more general purposes. No matter what type of research…
image Behavioral Economics and Customer Experience – Part 2 – Price Gouging and Revenge
Price gouging – a particularly insidious move The New York Attorney General has launched an investigation into Mylan Pharmaceuticals, the maker of EpiPens. An EpiPen is used to provide life-saving…
image Valentine’s Day blog – How to stay married – to your customers of course!
Valentine’s Day thoughts about the parallels between the relationships we have with our significant others, and the relationships companies have with their clients.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

New Yorker article on how hard it is to use facts to change people’s minds

I am often struck by how many articles and infographics about customer experience lead with the facts. Percentages of this. Proportions of that. Many of the articles build perfectly logical arguments for investing in customer experience resources and programs. One challenge is that most people in any given audience or readership will already have made up their minds before starting to read or listen. It is very difficult to change people’s minds with facts. The article is by Elizabeth Kolbert, who has won the Pultizer Prize for general nonfiction in 2015. It demonstrates comprehensively that facts don’t work well for changing people’s minds, though no new alternative is proposed. The experiments describes are all entertaining, and some make me uncomfortable, as I recognize myself. The article is here.

CustomerGauge article on improving subject lines in survey emails sent to customers

A nice article and infographic on effective subject lines for outbound survey emails. It is worth doing things like trying new variations on half the emails you send out to see whether response rates do indeed improve. The infographic explains the suggestions in a nice way, and you can find the article here.

Looking forward

Learning the new software required to produce good-looking Kindle books has proven more complex than I expected. I write in Scrivener, and the Kindle books it can output do not have the table of contents in the correct place and lack a few formatting features I would like. This has meant that I have finally had to learn some HTML and how to use Sigil to reformat the Scrivener output. I try to tell myself it is all a necessary and fun learning experience.

Thanks for reading. Please share with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for the newsletter here. Note that I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Please excuse minor formatting issues that appear on some platforms as I work to improve the website. 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.

#6 Customer-centric culture, Star Wars NPS guide

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Customer Strategy Header Welcome to my sixth newsletter covering customer experience and customer-centric business strategy. The four topics this week are:

  1. Latest posts, other thoughts
  2. Highlights from my own blog.
  3. Notable customer experience items from other sites.
  4. Looking forward

View this email online

Valentine’s Day blog post

Tuesday was Valentine’s day, so my thoughts turned to love… Of course I mean love of our customers. I started to write on the subject two years ago, and have improved my thinking over that time, I believe. The post is about the parallel between the relationships we have with our significant others and those we have with our customers. Link below. I used to believe that the principles apply only to B2B customers, but I now understand that they also apply to a major category of B2C customers: those with whom companies have an ongoing contractual relationship.

 Happy couple

Thoughts on establishing a customer-centric culture

I was speaking to about 20 country managing directors and function leaders of a major multinational in Vienna earlier today. The subject was how to establish a customer-centric culture. It can be quite challenging in a multinational, depending on how the various managers of businesses, functions and geographies matrix together. Businesses, functions and geographies tend to establish their strategies and initiatives somewhat independently of each other. If you ever find yourself in a group of such leaders, a nice way of cutting the ‘denial stage’ short is to go to each of their intranet pages in advance, and copy down what they list as their top priorities. It is even better to get their latest all-employee email. Do customers make the formal list? In most companies, you get a mix of “of course everyone is responsible for customer experience improvement” and a lack of it being on anyone’s formal priority list.

In multinationals, employees in an individual country will usually read whatever the local country MD writes, and listen to what he or she says, no matter where they formally report. The reason is that everyone’s pay and conditions are local. An exception is the corporate HQ country, where employees will pay more attention to the CEO. Elsewhere, no matter what the corporate structure is, local customers will turn to the local country leadership whenever things go wrong. I will always remember a story the UK MD at HP told about a consumer showing up at his private home with a non-functioning printer, for example. The local country MD is the media spokesperson, and has to chair the local Workers Council, if there is one. They set the tone for the country. This means that local customer-centricity needs to be driven by the MD. Internal and external communication about priorities and initiatives needs to be brief and consistent. Ideally, it should be similar in all countries, and at the corporate level too. It can’t be identical everywhere because small countries do not have the resources needed to implement as many initiatives as large countries can.

Our latest blog posts

Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.

image Valentine’s Day blog – How to stay married – to your customers of course!

Valentine’s Day thoughts about the parallels between the relationships we have with our significant others, and the relationships companies have with their clients.
image ‘Gaming’ survey results is common – Here is how to do it

When your first-line managers and employees are measured individually on the results of surveys, ‘gaming the results’ is common and easy. What follows may seem a bit cynical, but has its basis in reality. I have seen all of these done in practice.
image Behavioral economics and customer experience – Part 1

Behavioral economics is a relatively new field. It combines economic and psychological theory and reaches new conclusions. Economic theory holds that people always behave rationally, optimizing their financial and other outcomes. Behavioral economists have proved something very different…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Apparently, mentioning Star Wars makes people want to read this NPS guide

Paul Campillo, Kreg Franco and Ester Antolino collaborated to create The Star Wars Guide to the Net Promoter Score for the Typeform site. It is nicely illustrated and makes a good read. The title is a little misleading in that it covers the whole system, quite briefly, and entertainingly, of course. May the Promoters be with you!

Star Wars Guide to NPS

Inc. Magazine – 6 Shocking Tools Every Customer Service Rep Needs From Your Company…

Not really ‘shocking’ but I suppose using the word in the headline made me read the article. A good read, focusing on the emotional support needed to perform well in a service center. The article is here.

Looking forward

I have not been able to get the second post in the behavioral economics series out today. It will be out in the next few days, I promise. The subjects are price gouging and revenge. Peter has lined up a particularly incisive drawing that seems to be about a certain Martin Shkreli.

Thanks for reading. Please share with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for the newsletter here. Spreading the word is important to me. I have avoided doing annoying things like having subscription popups on the website, so am dependent on you. 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.

#5 Behavioral Economics, Customer Lifetime Value

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Welcome to my fifth newsletter covering customer experience and customer-centric business strategy. The four topics this week are:

  1. Reactions to latest posts, other thoughts
  2. Highlights from my own blog.
  3. Notable customer experience items from other sites.
  4. Looking forward

View this email online

The post about employee and customer satisfaction is still popular

My post on the relationship between customer and employee satisfaction is heading towards 2,000 views. While I am pleased with that, and have received a number of direct emails on the subject, I am surprised that nobody has commented about it on the website. It is controversial. I think most people do not believe it is true. I would like to restate that a happy employee is not necessarily an engaged employee. A person who likes how close they live to work, the beautiful grounds around the office building, and the food they have in the company restaurant is not necessarily doing anything positive for customers. That is why there is such a weak relationship between employee and customer satisfaction.

Various people have suggested that my statement that Glassdoor does not accept requests from client companies to remove negative comments my not be true. Glassdoor’s position on the subject is here, and more can be found in their website section called ‘Legal FAQ’. For the sake of balance, a discussion that seems to suggest the opposite in some cases is here. Clearly, any gaming that happens could only be in the upwards direction.

Why behavioral economics matters

Over my career I have sometimes been told that I am annoyingly logical. My evidence-based approach to strategy and customer experience work has sometimes crossed the fine line between being persistent and being irritating. Of course, I used to dismiss the irritated people as simply being wrong. That was before I started to read behavioral economics books, notably those by Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely. I learned that intelligence is of far less practical use than I once thought. People, including customers, behave far less rationally than we like to think. Emotion rules. Rational thought comes a distant second. I wish I had learned how to ‘lead with emotion’ much earlier in my career. That is why I have started a new series of blog posts that share some of what I have now learned.

Our latest blog posts

Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.

image ‘Gaming’ survey results is common – Here is how to do it When your first-line managers and employees are measured individually on the results of surveys, ‘gaming the results’ is common and easy. What follows may seem a bit cynical, but has its basis in reality. I have seen all of these done in practice.
image Behavioral economics and customer experience – Part 1 Behavioral economics is a relatively new field. It combines economic and psychological theory and reaches new conclusions. Economic theory holds that people always behave rationally, optimizing their financial and other outcomes. Behavioral economists have proved something very different…
image Survey design considerations A set of things to consider as you decide whether and how to conduct customer research. There are too many surveys in the world. This post will help you concentrate on research that makes a difference for customers
Notable customer experience items from other sites

Harvard Business Review: Customer Loyalty is Overrated

Provocative article by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin. The essential point they make is that customers are people of habit, and will keep on doing what they have been doing unless there is a really good reason to change. They say that customers are not rational, and use arguments from behavioral psychology to support their views. The web page includes articles that disagree with what they say. Well worth reading for anyone interested in business strategy. You can find the article here. Note that you get free access to 8 articles a year just by registering.

Customer Lifetime Value: Net Promoter System podcast

How much is one of your customers worth to you over the entire time they have done and will do business with you? This should be one of the most important standards of financial reporting, in my opinion, and it is not. There are standards for banks to report on the value of loans, which is quite similar, but nothing for customers. Some outsourcing and consulting companies have their own methods and provide internal-only financial reporting that way. Rob Markey invited Peter Fader of Wharton school of the University of Pennsylvania to join him on the Net Promoter System podcast last week to discuss how to do it. I learned a lot, and have to re-write a chapter of my NPS implementation book after listening to it.

How to complain effectively in three easy steps

A short and entertaining read by the mysteriously anonymous ‘Matthew’. He tells the story of how he helped his friend ‘John’ to complain to United after a missed connection at Newark airport. John tried hard, but did not get what he wanted. Matthew shows us how to do it correctly here.

Looking forward

It will be Valentine’s Day next Tuesday, and you can look forward to a post on how to stay married… to your customers of course. Apologies in advance to readers in Australia and New Zealand, who may only be able to see the post when the day itself is over. I will do my best to post early.

Thank you for the many kind words received about Peter’s drawings. Peter’s profile is here. In addition to being an artist, he creates beautiful websites for artists, galleries, lawyers / solicitors and other businesses. His website is here.

Thanks for reading. Please share with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up here. 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.

#4 Reactions to employee/customer sat posts, relationship between CX and revenue

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Welcome to my fourth newsletter covering customer experience and customer-centric business strategy. The four topics this week are:

  1. Reactions to latest posts, other thoughts
  2. Highlights from my own blog
  3. Notable customer experience items from other sites
  4. Looking forward

View this email online

More reactions to posts about employee and customer satisfaction

I have to admit I was a bit nervous when I put links to this Tuesday’s blog post on LinkedIn. After all, LinkedIn is at the top of one of the ‘bad lists’. They have outstanding employee satisfaction as measured by Glassdoor ratings. At the same time, they have horrible American Customer Satisfaction Index ratings, down in the bottom 10%. Twitter is in a similar position. What is it about the four social media companies on that list? Maybe the lack of direct customer contact is an issue? This is the table I am referring to:

Employee satisfaction
The most frequent comments I have received on these posts have been requests to clarify what I mean when I say that employee satisfaction and employee engagement are different concepts. An employee who is happy with his or her pay, the free food in the company restaurant, and their short commute distance is not necessarily doing anything at all to make customers happy. An engaged employee is working with others in their team, and indeed with other teams, towards clear company goals. If a company plans to take share from competitors, providing a superior customer experience should be on that list of goals.

Thoughts about a customer culture

If you search on “customer culture”, you quickly find quite long lists of things you should do to achieve one. Micah Solomon wrote about his 7 Secrets of Building a Customer-centric Company Culture for Forbes, for example. His is one of the shorter lists, and it does not even cover implementation. Linden and Chris Brown gave their seven ways to Diagnose your Customer Culture in the Harvard Business Review. OK, you have done your diagnosis. Now what? Personally, I don’t like lists that are too long to remember. What would you think of just two points?

  • Clear company strategy and initiatives that are externally focused, concentrating on customers, resellers and competitors. The CEO and leadership team all communicate the same strategy internally and externally. It is visible on their intranet and extranet pages, and consistently communicated in messages to employees. Individual business, function and country strategies and initiatives all fit into the corporate strategy.
  • The leaders’ actions match their words. This becomes visible in the structure of the teams that report directly to the leaders, and in the way they deploy their people and other resources. It is clear that there is a formal customer listening and improvement process that makes things better for customers. Customers and resellers are told what the company has learned from them, and what will actually get done.

I invite you to inspect your own company and to assess it on these two points. Customers don’t currently have to like you for the culture to exist. Getting from negative or neutral customer perceptions and market share trends to something more positive takes time. It will accelerate things if your company culture is more customer-centric than that of your competitors.

Our latest blog posts

Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.

image Survey design considerations

There really are too many surveys in the world. Here are some things to consider if you want to set up a new customer research process or improve an existing one. Includes examples of poor practices as well as current thinking on the relationship between the number of questions and both completion and drop-out rates.
image Best and worst combinations of customer and employee satisfaction

Follow-on to the employee-customer satisfaction blog post. Features four tables that show the combinations of best and worst customer and employee satifaction for large companies that sell to US consumers. Big surprises in the list of companies with great employee satisfaction and horrible customer satisfaction.
image Does employee satisfaction drive customer satisfaction? In general… no!

Covers my original meta-study to show that employee satisfaction does not matter much for customer satisfaction for the majority of 340 large businesses selling to US consumers. High-touch businesses are an exception. I believe this is the first study to combine American Customer Satisfaction Index numbers with Glassdoor employee ratings to reach new insights.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Jeanne Bliss: “Yes, good CX is tied to revenue gains”

Nice post from Jeanne Bliss about the relationship between customer experience and revenue. She relies on Forrester research results for her conclusions. Jeanne is the author of Chief Customer Officer 2.0. She has occupied that position at Microsoft and Lands’ End, among others. You can find her blog post here.

Bruce Temkin provides 20 industry charts on how CX relates to buying

In the same general vein as Jeanne’s blog post, Bruce Temkin provided 20 interesting charts that show how customer experience improvements relate to revenue for 20 different industries. He posted it on LinkedIn here.

Tips on using text analytics

As many readers know, I consider automated text analytics to be the most important frontier of customer experience research. We need to be able to ask customers open questions and limit human bias when analyzing the answers. Nobody has a perfect solution yet. Matti Airas of Etuma has just published a useful eBook that provides 23 Tips on Using Text Analysis to Increase Customer Loyalty. I enjoyed the tips and find them insightful.

Looking forward

Next week will see the first in a series of posts about behavioral economics and its implications for strategy and customer experience. I am a great fan of Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely in particular. I consider their books to be essential reading. We humans do not behave nearly as rationally as we would like to believe. Behavioral economics explains why.

Our book writing and illustrating is going well. I am still optimistic about being ready to release them around the end of the month. I have not done something like this before, and suppose all sorts of last-minute panic items will arise. I am already learning how difficult it is to have a single format for graphics that works for both Kindle and print versions.

Thanks for reading. Please share with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up here. 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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