Most new product development is done by guessing what customers want, then surveying them at the end to confirm. Customer co-creation flips that. After 18 months working with a financial services client that ran an online conversational community alongside focus groups, here are four ways to involve customers in NPD that lower risk and lift relevance.
Customer-delight programs feel right and are nearly impossible to make repeatable. The HBR research "Stop trying to delight your customers" puts a number on it: making business easy beats delighting at building loyalty. Here's what that research actually found, why Transactional NPS beats Customer Effort Score for capturing the same signal, and how to run the survey at scale without drowning.
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.
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.
![Practical Statistics: How to Test if Your Customer Feedback Score Really Changed [Excel]](/_astro/bigstock_Doctor_2578633-e1568690380205.DMuSFxny.jpg)
Comparing two survey averages and calling them different (or the same) is the most common mistake in customer feedback reporting — and it leads to killing things that are working and persisting with things that aren't. Here's how to run Student's t-Test in Excel to know whether the change is real, with a step-by-step worked example.
Some companies operate at high performance year after year, and others scrap to stay in business. The variable most often missing from the under-performers is genuine customer advocacy, a way of operating that goes well beyond fee-for-service. Here's how high-performing companies set themselves apart, written by guest contributor Seb Atkinson.