Loyalty programs are the price you pay for rich customer data, you make money from the careful use of that data. That insight, and the 2002 Reinartz/Kumar Harvard Business Review research that backs it, changes how you decide which customers earn loyalty investment and which don't. Here's the practical structure that follows from it.
Presenting negative customer feedback to executives, the room goes from agreeable nodding to defensive deflection at exactly the slide where specifics start showing. Defend, defer, deflect, deny, the four Ds. Until executives own the feedback, nothing changes. Here's how to get past the 4Ds, including the first-hand customer experience that does more than any chart.
Charles Goodyear ran thousands of rubber experiments, but it was the analysis, not the mixing, that turned them into vulcanisation. Most customer feedback programs do the mixing and skip the analysis. Here are five analysis disciplines that decide whether your feedback drives change or quietly fills a database.
Bad survey questions don't just annoy the respondent, they hand you data that's quietly wrong, and you only find out months later when you try to act on it. Here are the worst real-world survey question patterns I've collected, from biased phrasing to mandatory questions with no "N/A", and how to spot them in your own survey before they ship.
Most businesses chase new customers while their existing ones quietly leak out the back door. It's the wrong way round, retention is cheaper, faster and lower risk. Here are three practical retention plays you can put in motion this week, not next quarter.
Retention programs work best when they match where the customer actually is — new, established, wobbling or already out the door. Use a renewal play on a brand-new customer and you'll waste money; use an onboarding play on a defector and they're gone. Here's how to match the initiative to the lifecycle stage.