You've brainstormed, wordsmithed and polished the survey questions, but if you skip the TRACER check before you hit send, the survey will quietly under-deliver. TRACER (random sample, respect, actionable, clear, easy, relevant) is the six-attribute filter your survey must pass. Here's each attribute explained, with the most common ways surveys fail each one.
You can't calculate customer lifetime value without a customer retention rate, and most companies calculate retention rate wrong, mostly because they include customers acquired during the period. Here's the formula done properly, with cohort handling, time-period conversions, and a free calculator. Plus the difference between retention, churn and attrition that even quite senior people muddle.
Twenty years running a business will teach you a fair bit about customer service, but it's not everything. So we asked twelve small-business owners and customer service experts a single question: what's your personal, number-one customer service must-do? The answers are sharper, weirder and more actionable than the textbooks.
Before any of the survey effort matters, the recipient has to open the email, and the subject line is the entire decision. Across millions of survey invites sent for clients, the patterns are consistent enough to be a checklist. Here are seven rules for subject lines that beat the delete reflex: keep it short and sincere, make it about the customer, skip emojis, use a person as the sender.
Most CX makeovers are announced loudly, then quietly under-deliver against the expectations the announcement set up. Kmart's turnaround did the opposite: they fixed the experience first and let customers notice. Here's what that approach looks like in practice, and why it tends to beat the big-bang announcement.
Forrester's three secrets of great CX organisations turn out to be good leadership, collaborative teams and enough resources. Those aren't CX secrets, they're the secrets to running any support function well. Here's the case that Customer Experience Management is mostly a new theatre for old skills, not a new craft.
