Mystery shopping has been the standard "how are we doing at the front line" tool for decades. Transactional NPS surveys, practical only in the last few years, quietly do most of the same job for less cost, with the customer's actual voice. Here's the side-by-side, where mystery shopping still wins, and where transactional surveys clearly take over.
You're running transactional NPS, customer comments are pouring in, advocates are being identified, and you're doing nothing to turn them into sales. Day in, day out, customers are putting their hands up to recommend you, and you're not handing them the tools. Here are three concrete steps to convert advocates into revenue, starting now.
Voice-of-the-Customer practitioners complain that management doesn't fund VoC, then list "collect more data" as their top priority and rank "make changes to the business" dead last. That's why management doesn't fund it. Here's how to demonstrate the ROI of a customer feedback program the way marketers demonstrate the ROI of campaigns, and stop perpetuating the data-collection-only myth.
94% of people say an online review has convinced them to avoid a business, and Google, Facebook and Yelp keep pushing review volume up. Your customer feedback program can quietly do the heavy lifting on both sides of that ledger. Here's how to use transactional surveys to suppress bad reviews and steer happy customers to leave good ones.
Australia's Federal Government clipped the baby bonus by less than 10%, and the backlash was loud. The same dynamic shows up in customer-delight programs: once customers expect it, taking it back hurts more than never offering it in the first place. Here's why customer delight can be counter-productive, and what to do instead.
Online customer advisory panels are useful — fast feedback, large sample sizes — but the ones run by market research companies build a relationship with the researcher, not you. There's a more valuable version: a dedicated panel that belongs to your brand. Here's how one ran for an insurance client launching a new direct brand, and what it returned that an outsourced panel couldn't.