Data Analysis

Customer feedback isn't a thermometer reading — it comes back tangled with halo effects, three-year-old memories and irrelevant tangents. That doesn't make it useless. Here's why messy data is still rich data, and how to stop "the data isn't clean enough" being used as a reason not to act.

A great score on one feedback attribute often means nothing more than a great score on brand image colouring everything else. Psychologists have known about the halo effect for a century — most CX teams still report scores as if it didn't exist. Here's how to spot it in your data, with a worked example from a Canstar mobile-phone survey.