You can watch the webinar on demand here: https://www.tlfresearch.com/webinars/b2b-onboarding-acquisition-and-exiting-customer-surveys/

They talk about the different loops that need to be closed, some ways to do it, and agree that every customer deserves feedback if they want it.

You can watch the webinar here: https://www.tlfresearch.com/webinars/essentials-closing-the-loop-with-customers/

You can download the action plan template mentioned in the episode here: https://www.tlfresearch.com/downloads/cx-tools-and-templates/action-plan-template/

And if you want more detail, we also run an online course on action planning: https://www.tlfresearch.com/training-events/on-demand-action-planning-from-customer-insight/

Greg and Stephen talk through the speakers and discuss some of the highlights of the day (not just the food).

They discuss the different hats that you need to wear to turn data into a story, how the needs of your audiences vary, and how a few simple principles can level up your data visualisation and reporting.

The webinar is available to watch on demand here: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/8370348262845712218

In this episode Greg and Stephen discuss some of the challenges of using customer research in the construction sector, and the benefits of focusing on depth of insight rather than just tracking a score.

Is survey fatigue a red herring? We think it is!

If you missed the webinar you can find it here: https://www.tlfresearch.com/webinars/b2b-sampling-methodology-and-battling-response-rates/

We shared some stats for context in terms of consumer sentiment, satisfaction, AI adoption, and sustainability; made some gentle predictions about the future; and outlined some choices that organisations should be making now.

You can watch the recording here: https://www.tlfresearch.com/webinars/the-customer-experience-landscape-2024/

In this episode Greg chats to Stephen about his research for the webinar, his predictions, and how it all comes back to customer loyalty.

What does it tell us about where the IT Services sector is going, when it comes to Customer Experience?

Some keys are: thinking in advance about what you’re going to do with the results, proving the value of investing in customers, and making sure your survey basics are sound.

If you missed the webinar, you can watch it on demand here: https://www.tlfresearch.com/webinars/does-your-research-provide-value-for-money/

• You can watch Greg’s webinar on demand here: https://www.tlfresearch.com/webinars/measuring-customer-satisfaction-in-the-it-services-sector/
• The follow up webinar, on driving action, is here: https://www.tlfresearch.com/webinars/managed-it-service-providers-driving-actions-from-your-client-surveys/
• Finally, you can find Stephen’s review of Fred Reichheld’s latest book here: https://www.tlfresearch.com/customer-insight-magazine/book-review-winning-on-purpose/

If you missed the webinar, you can watch it on demand: https://www.tlfresearch.com/webinars/the-customer-experience-landscape-2023/

Stephen and Irina talk about the missed opportunities in post-purchase communications, why organisations value new customers over existing customers, and where customer journeys begin and end.

Thanks to www.podcagent.com for arranging the interview.

You can read Albert’s articles for Customer Insight magazine here.

We mentioned the MINDSPACE framework from the Behavioural Insights Team, and the classic paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” which covers issues such as the file drawer problem and p-hacking.

Customer loyalty is much misunderstood (it’s about far more than retention and “loyalty programmes”), but used in the right way it can be the key to linking the operational focus of customer experience to your organisation’s strategy.

If you missed the webinar, you can watch it on demand here: https://www.tlfresearch.com/webinars/understanding-customer-loyalty-attitudes-behaviour-and-value/

Love it or hate it, you can’t deny that NPS has been the most successful movement in the history of customer research.

NPS has become a de facto standard, but like its inventor Fred Reichheld, we have reservations about the way in which it’s used. In this episode Greg and Stephen talk about some of the ways NPS is used and misused by businesses and customers.

It’s not about “voice of the customer” research programmes, but about ways in which the actual voice of the customer (captured in audio, video, or in the flesh) can be used to make an impact.

In this episode Greg and Stephen discuss why TLF Research started measuring consumer sentiment, what the trends show, and why it matters.

You can download the free white paper to explore the findings in more detail: https://www.tlfresearch.com/downloads/the-index-of-consumer-sentiment-quarter-1-2022/

One of Stephen’s recommendations was to sign up for Purple Tuesday, which we mentioned on the last episode. You can do that here: https://purpletuesday.org.uk/

If you missed the webinar, you can watch it on demand: https://www.tlfresearch.com/webinars/the-customer-experience-landscape-2022

Last year we teamed up with Purple Tuesday to survey disabled customers on our panel in order to better understand their experiences. We learned along the way that UK businesses lost over £400 million during the pandemic alone due to inaccessible websites. You can find out more about the research in this article: https://www.tlfresearch.com/purple-tuesday/

In the episode Greg and Stephen discuss some of the key themes, reflect on whether a better disabled customer experience means a better experience for all customers, and ask what more we need to be doing.

Albert is writing a series of articles on behavioural science for Customer Insight (starting with this one), and it was really good to talk it all through, compare notes, and share a few bugbears!

Understanding what you can take from theory, how to blend it with the knowledge of people on the ground, and why it’s still important to test things with customers can make a big difference to designing new customer experiences.

Is it all bad, or does procurement have an important role to play? How can suppliers and their customers build closer relationships, and make sure they both get what they want out of a project? Greg and Stephen talk it through.

What do we know about what’s changing in the way customers think, feel, and behave? The pandemic seems to have accelerated some trends that were already obvious, and introduced a few curveballs of its own.

In this episode Greg and Stephen discuss the evidence from consumer surveys, national measures of satisfaction and consumer sentiment, and data about actual customer behaviour.

Some of the things referenced are TLF Research’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, the Institute of Customer Service’s UKCSI, and this article on Google search trends.

This conversation really helped to put their model into context, and opens up a much wider context for thinking about culture, management, and the best ways to use office space.

In this episode Greg quizzes Stephen about what the course covers, what learners can expect, and why we created the course.

If you’re interested, you can find out more at https://www.tlfresearch.com/online-customer-journey-mapping-course/ The next start date is 27th September 2021.

In this episode Greg and Stephen discuss a recent article that shows another mechanism by which satisfaction benefits the bottom line: it reduces the cost of capital for organisations.

They take that as a jumping-off point to talk about proving the business case, and why a loyalty strategy is better for everyone.

Here’s the Igloo Energy article that Stephen mentioned.

Greg and Stephen discuss the timing of the survey, what we learned (including how lockdown had affected their customer experience programmes and the future challenges they anticipated), and why it helps us empathise with our clients.

In it they discuss the combination of customer research and account management, driven by top level commitment to the customer, that has led to a rapid improvement in Mitie’s overall NPS.

Greg and Stephen talk about the lessons we can all draw from Mitie’s story, and mostly avoid getting drawn into a discussion about the questionable benefits of tender processes.

In this episode Greg and Stephen talk about the webinar “Measuring Trust” (which is running again in July: https://www.tlfresearch.com/measuring-trust/ ), and why trust is crucial to predicting how customers will react when things go wrong.

Who’s it for, what’s it about, and what makes it different to all the other customer experience books that are out there?

If you’re interested you can buy the paperback from TLF Research and there is also a Kindle version.

Stephen argues that qualitative research is more vital now than it’s ever been, and that the three big themes for 2021 are Culture, Sustainability, and Empathy.

If you missed the webinar, you can watch a recording.

Action is hard not because it’s unclear what needs to happen, but because of the power of the status quo. The decisions you make before and during your survey can be more important than what you do with it afterwards.

Are B2B relationships different, and if they are what does that mean for the journeys we map, and the tools we use to do it?

Stephen and Greg pick up the discussion to consider the ways in which this theory, and this approach to qualitative research, could be used in customer experience research.

In part 1 Chris gives an in-depth overview of the field, and explains his view that the theory of semiotics advanced by Charles Peirce can be be more helpful than Saussurian semiotics when it comes to understanding how consumers create brand meaning.

Focusing on individual customers, rather than cultural codes, means that semiotics combined with qualitative research can be used to understand how brand meanings are created, and how they change and evolve over time.

Next time we’ll discuss the applications of semiotics to customer experience.

What is benchmarking good for? Is it a distraction, a vanity exercise, or can it be used as a source of improvement?

Along the way we talk about the power of “moments of kindness” in a crisis, wonder about how to make sure we remember to look for those moments when things return to a “new normal”, and discuss what the future may look like as ways of working change and customer priorities shift.

In the final chapter we discuss how getting your research design right makes your analysis and outcomes easier, why you still need to work hard to build bridges between insight and action, and how it changes as you rise up the league table. We wonder if it’s harder for public companies to take a long term view of the customer and, if so, what we might be able to do about that.

As Greg and Stephen comment, there’s no such thing as “survey fatigue”, only lack of action and communication fatigue.

Stephen and Greg talk about how things have moved on since the book was written, and discuss some favourite tools for involving people.

Greg and Stephen chat about using surveys to improve the customer experience, why some things take time, and why it’s worth it.

Greg and Stephen discuss how to think strategically about customer satisfaction, the value of delight, and whether detractors may be easier to turn into promoters than passives are.

Greg and Stephen talk about how to get the competitor information you need, the differences between B2B and B2C markets, and explain why the most important thing of all is making sure you attract the right kind of customers.

Greg and Stephen discuss Chapter 12 of the book Customer Satisfaction, which is all about making sure your survey results in actionable outcomes for the organisation.

Greg and Stephen discuss what you should measure, how often, and what sample sizes you need to reach reliable conclusions. Along the way they discuss butterflies and barnacles, how long it takes customer perceptions to change, and the danger of weaving narratives around volatile survey results.

We talked about the emotional basis of loyalty, the importance of conviction leaders, and how to go about making sure you have the right staff and customers.

We’re also really happy that Chris has agreed to headline our Customer Insight Conference on November 6^th in London, so do come and hear from him in person if you can!

We’re also really happy that Chris has agreed to headline our Customer Insight Conference on November 6^th in London, so do come and hear from him in person if you can!

For our first in the series we spoke to Ian Golding. We’ve known and worked with Ian for many years, so it was really good to catch up with him and hear his views on the latest in Customer Experience. He was as articulate and passionate as ever, and talked through some of the things he finds frustrating as well his view on how organisations can unite the customer journey with process and technology.

You need to know when to use a mean or median, what the standard deviation tells you, and how to use correlation in order to get the most out of your survey; but knowing how to interpret the numbers is just as important as knowing how to work them out.

The quality of the questionnaire, making sure you’re asking the right questions in the right way, is vital because it underpins everything that comes afterwards. Sadly it’s often rushed, designed by committee, and doesn’t feel relevant to customers.

Greg and Stephen talk about the balance of questions, who should be consulted, the ideal length, and much, much, more.

Greg and Stephen talk through the issues, explaining why the ten-point numerical scale is the only sensible option for customer research, whether you’re using a Satisfaction Index or Net Promoter Score.

Getting the fieldwork right is one of the most important parts of the customer research process.

Beyond the theory, we talk through some of the practical issues in designing an effective survey process.

In this brief special episode Stephen and Greg review the day, picking out some of their favourite points.

Some slides and photos from the day will be going live on the conference site.

In this special episode Stephen chats to each of the TLF speakers, including our host for the day Chris Elliot, about some of the highlights of what we covered.

It’s all about getting a deep understanding of how a small number of customers see the world, helping you make sure you can speak their language when it comes to further research.

In this recap episode Greg and Stephen run down the list, and discuss which of them is the most important (if we had to pick just one). Needless to say, they don’t quite agree.

We’ve mentioned “perception is reality” more than once on the podcast. In this episode, Greg and Stephen talk about the role of communication in helping customers to recognise the improvements that you’re making.

Dealing with problems and complaints effectively is a big priority for many organisations, but it can often feel like an insurmountable challenge. Greg and Stephen talk about why it matters so much, what effective problem handling looks like, and how customer insight can help.

In this episode, Greg and Stephen discuss the importance of getting your suppliers on board when it comes to creating great customer experiences, and why customer satisfaction might be the only SLA you need.

In this episode, Greg and Stephen talk about the sometimes controversial idea of rewarding employees based on customer satisfaction, as well as which schemes work well.

In this episode, Greg and Stephen talk about ways to make sure the right people in the organisation get the information they need from customer insight.

They also run through some of the techniques you can use to measure what matters most to customers, looking at pros and cons.

In this episode, Greg and Stephen dig into the single thing which makes the most difference to top performers: actually doing something. What can you do to help your organisation act on customer research?

In this special episode Greg and I discuss the takeaways, and there’s also an interview with our guest speaker Andrew Davis. You can find more from Andrew on twitter at https://twitter.com/andrew_davis or on his website http://thinkingoutsidetheblog.com/

Some other things we mentioned were our guide to writing a research brief https://www.tlfresearch.com/customer-research-brief and the work on patient personas at Rotterdam Eye hospital https://hbr.org/2017/11/how-design-thinking-is-improving-patient-caregiver-conversations

In this episode, Greg and Stephen talk about how important it is to focus on a small number of what we call “Priorities for Improvement”, to help your colleagues focus and your customers notice change.

In this episode, Greg and Stephen discuss the trap of “Paralysis by Analysis”, and how to distinguish legitimate questions about your survey from time-wasting red herrings.

In this episode, Greg and Stephen talk about getting everyone in your organisation to understand that “Perception is Reality” for customers, and why that can open up new ways to improve.

In this episode, Greg and Stephen talk about the importance of Senior Management Commitment to the customer.

This chapter’s all about dispelling some common myths.