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.
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.
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.
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.
An IT service delivery manager claimed his only measurement of customer experience was the ITIL service delivery process. That's a familiar mistake: confusing system-driven call-management metrics with the customer's actual experience. Here's where ITIL helps, where it's quietly blind, and how to layer customer feedback on top so you're tracking what customers care about — not just what's easy to measure.
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.