It's tempting to use NPS to track staff performance, particularly when the business has grown beyond where the CEO can be everywhere. It's also a fast way to break the program. Here's why score-focused NPS produces score-begging instead of improvement, and what to focus on instead, including the surprising case for targeting response rate not NPS.
The quality-versus-quantity strategic debate is decades old and still doesn't have a one-size-fits-all answer. But there's one decision rule the winners all follow: pick a position and be ruthless about it. Wolters Kluwer's CX regional manager Janine Scott on why service innovation matters as much as product innovation, and how to choose between the two paths.
Recommending a competitor sounds like commercial suicide. Done well, it's one of the strongest trust signals you can send, and it pays back in loyalty most marketers chronically under-value. Here's when to do it, and how to make sure it doesn't read as a gimmick.
American Airlines was getting three times more on-hold Twitter complaints than its nearest competitor, even after adjusting for passenger miles. Could public crowd data predict NPS without running a survey? The numbers say yes, and that has interesting implications for benchmarking, brand monitoring, and how loudly hold times leak into customer loyalty.
Zappos pizza deliveries, Nordstrom snow chains, the customer-service folklore is great theatre, but it's terrible strategy for most businesses. Inflated expectations are expensive to meet and impossible to sustain. Here's why those legendary stories aren't actually aimed at you, and what to deliver instead.
Customer service and customer retention get talked about as if they're the same thing. They aren't, but the link between them is more interesting than most CX talks make out. Here's a real story about a wedding, a Flight Centre travel agent, and three facts that explain why great service really does keep customers.