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.
There's a recurring critique that NPS doesn't actually measure anything real. It's a fair question, and it deserves a proper answer rather than a defensive one. Here's a pragmatic case for using a methodology that works, even when no one can fully explain why.
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.
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.
Refer-a-friend programs are everywhere, and the recent Schmitt-Skiera-Van den Boulte paper finally puts hard numbers behind whether they actually pay. The answer is yes: customers from paid referral programs retain longer and contribute more margin than non-referred customers. Here's the data, and what it means for how much to spend on stimulated word-of-mouth.