The Blog

Zappos pizza deliveries, Nordstrom snow chains, the customer-service folklore is great theatre, but it's terrible strategy for most businesses. Inflated expectations are expensive to meet and impossible to sustain. Here's why those legendary stories aren't actually aimed at you, and what to deliver instead.

Customer satisfaction surveys often show stable scores while churn quietly climbs, and most teams can't explain the gap. nib health funds' data, analysed properly, shows NPS is roughly three times more sensitive at predicting churn than CSAT, and Detractors are 1.5 times more likely to leave than Promoters. Here's the analysis.

Sharing live customer feedback openly inside the organisation triggers anxiety at every level, what if the comments are scathing, what if staff react badly. nib and MYOB do it anyway, and credit transparency as a key reason their NPS programs work. Here's how to roll out feedback transparency thoughtfully, and the unexpected benefits (self-correction, validated frontline insight) that follow.

Carlson Restaurants runs about 900 outlets including TGI Fridays, a saturated industry where loyalty is genuinely hard. Their CFO-level NPS lead sat down to walk through four hard-won insights from the rollout: the threshold below which the score doesn't matter, why consistency beats spikes, the grand unified theory, and the case for driving behaviour not the number.

Losing a big B2B deal is expensive, and it's also a teachable moment most sales teams skip. Win/loss interviews salvage real learning from the loss, but only if they're done as interviews not surveys, and by someone other than the rep who lost the deal. Here's the full process, with the rules that keep the interviews honest.

Zip Water UK lifted NPS from +2 to +73 in three years, without making NPS a KPI or linking it to bonuses. They drove the change through CX culture and relentless root-cause analysis instead. Here's exactly what their CX lead and managing director did, in reproducible steps, with the trend chart to back it up.