I take pretty much every customer satisfaction survey I'm sent, it's a useful way to see what works and what to avoid. This is the first in a deconstruction series: a real survey from a web-hosting company, what they got right, and where it quietly fell over. Names removed; the lessons aren't.
Most customer feedback programs launch with energy and quietly die between months 12 and 24. The six causes are predictable, lack of senior buy-in, no business linkage, siloed implementation, treating it as a project instead of a process, and each one is preventable if you spot it at the start. Here's the checklist.
275,000 HSBC customers went unpaid on a Friday before a long weekend. It's an extreme example, but your business has its own version, service failures happen, and the recovery process is what decides whether customers stay or leave. This is the long-form implementation guide: definition, business case, sources of leads, and how to make it stick.
Designing your business so customers are always 100% satisfied is a fantasy, what matters is the process that kicks in when satisfaction breaks. Here's how to design a service recovery process around negative feedback from your customer surveys, and the four steps to make it run reliably enough to drive profit.
Everyone says "engage all staff in the customer feedback process", and almost nobody actually does it. Our research across 80 organisations gives the chart that shows what happens when you do: significantly higher overall success. Here's why customer feedback isn't Marketing's, Strategy's or Customer Service's job alone, and how to genuinely get everyone involved without sliding into theatre.
Loyalty programs are the price you pay for rich customer data, you make money from the careful use of that data. That insight, and the 2002 Reinartz/Kumar Harvard Business Review research that backs it, changes how you decide which customers earn loyalty investment and which don't. Here's the practical structure that follows from it.