When examining any type of customer feedback, one issue that you will come up against is that the feedback people give is not like the feedback you get from a thermometer.

If you want to know what the temperature is you need only consult a thermometer of the correct type and it will tell you that information to any level of accuracy required. However, the feedback you receive from customers is not quite so neat and tidy.

Ask a customer to provide feedback on a particular touch-point and you are likely to also get information on other areas of the business. You will also get halo affects and other human based biases...

It seems to me that many customer experience initiatives are deeply flawed. They start out well intentioned but lack the right process improvement mindset to drive long term change.

The customer experience strategy that seems to be best practice at the moment is:

1. Do some research on what people want: ask a focus group, run a survey, etc,
2. Design “the best” customer experience based on the research.
3. Test it in a limited way –asking people what they think, doing some usability testing (i.e. watching what people actually do either actually or via analytics) of your systems.
4. Roll-it out.
5. Relax

The critical part is that the design process (steps 1 and 2)  is run only once. Then, having agreed that it is perfect just let it run. This is wrong.

I spent 10 years working...

You may find it hard to believe that there is any way that grounding every plane in the Qantas fleet could improve the customer experience but I think it will.

All of the usual pundits are saying that the recent three day grounding of the Qantas fleet has done immeasurable damage to their brand and reputation.  That’s to be expected and in the short term it certainly has...

Today we have another in the “common customer survey errors” series.  In truth I could write one of these posts pretty much every week but that might be too much for you, and me, to bear.

In this case one of my software vendors wanted some “customer feedback” and so they emailed out an invite to a customer survey.  The survey itself was not too bad.  Perhaps there were too many marketing segmentation questions and not enough business performance questions for my liking; maybe that’s just me.

On the other hand, in my opinion, there are three important flaws in this customer survey.

Asking customers what you already know

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