Blog

Customer Champions Blog

Our reflections on the key talking points of the customer relationship and customer experience marketplace.

• Alternatives to NPS in B2B 30th September 2014 Customer case studies and reference customers. Is Net Promoter Score (NPS) a relevant measure in a B2B environment? Or are case studies, customer references and testimonials of greater value to the business than a single response to a questionnaire concerning recommendation? Putting aside the issue of the accuracy of NPS and how well it may or may not be connected to Key Performance Indicators, is it relevant when in a B2B environment where often a relatively small ...
• Auditing Net Promoter Scores 29th May 2013 Should NPS scores be audited? There is no doubt that Net Promoter Score has to be the most widely known measure of customer loyalty, but with Boardrooms being increasingly keen to promote their NPS score, either internally or to the wider market, or simply to be able to compare their score with those that have been made public, is there the possibility that some are “managing their scores” and they should be audited by independent parties? Recently ...
• Customer Journey Mapping – are all your touchpoints open for business? 27th May 2015 Customer Journey Mapping is a tool that many organisations are turning to when they are looking to align their business with the customers’ experience. But perhaps some companies are not totally committed to ensuring all touchpoints are open for business in order to deliver a positive customer experience. Running a customer journey mapping workshop to launch your customer journey mapping work should be seen as the very start of your journey of customer alignment, not an ...
• How high can your NPS score be? 13th December 2013 How high can your NPS score be? So how high can your NPS score be? Is achieving a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 100 achievable? Almost every company that calculates an NPS score wants to know the answer to two questions: How does our NPS score compare against others? How high can our NPS score be? At the recent excellent Customer Engagement Summit in London a number of presenters pre-empted the revealing of their NPS score with statements on ...
• Internal Stakeholder Feedback is vital 26th July 2013 Do you really understand what your internal stakeholder wants from your customer feedback programme? Whilst asking customers for feedback is relatively straight forward the challenge of converting that into action still remains, and misunderstanding your internal stakeholder customer needs can be a key barrier. When there is not enough focus placed on understanding the needs of internal stakeholder customers we hear stories of research data being presented to management teams and then being frustrated that not ...
• Is the UK customer satisfaction index right? 26th November 2013 The July 2013 UK Customer Satisfaction Index report suggests that the overall level of customer satisfaction in the UK may well have plateaued. Here at Customer Champions we have seen this flat-lining of customer satisfaction across a wide range of companies over the years, yet it certainly has not indicated that customers are portraying high levels of loyalty. So is satisfaction the wrong measure, or are we missing the detail? The answer is probably ‘yes’ to ...
• Linking customer feedback to bonuses 19th June 2013 Having established a corporate measure of customer experience there is frequently a discussion around whether to link a target score for that measure to financial bonuses for either teams or individuals. This tends to raise a few points that need consideration: 1. To what extent can the individual influence the achievement of that target score? 2. Is the measure accurate enough to accommodate any natural statistical variation? E.g. is the change in score statistically significant? This is ...
• Loyalty cards versus customer service 15th February 2013 With the recent demise of a number of high street brands I have been able to reduce the burden on space in my wallet. The removal of loyalty cards for Blockbuster and HMV has freed up some space, but also made me consider how effective are loyalty card schemes for the long term growth of a retailing business in the first place, compared with providing excellent customer service? Where should the balance be between offering some ...
• Recognition of a Customer Champion 15th March 2013 Recognition of a Customer Champion As a regular user of Chiltern railways, and in particular the Warwick Parkway station I was delighted to read that Judith Biggs, who works at the station as a station host, has been awarded a British Empire Medal for her focus on the customer. A true Customer Champion. Judith is there every morning welcoming customers to the station and helping them park their cars, buy tickets and board trains. But it is ...
• Relevance as a single loyalty measure 1st November 2012 So what is the most impactful and insightful single measure you can gain from customer insight for whether your customers are likely to remain loyal and grow? A recent article suggested that “Relevance” may be the key measure. Certainly with a number of our clients having a technology and engineering focus we have found that there can be a tendency for them to show their customers “how clever they are” rather than ensuring what they are ...
• Research into Actions 9th April 2013 Or what an independent osteopathy clinic in Thrapston can do that many organisations would give their eye-teeth for! They don’t refer to their patients as customers and yet they are instinctive providers of customer service, never having attended a customer satisfaction course in their lives. They segmented their customer base by frequency of visit, length of relationship and date of last visit They logically worked through which would be most efficiently targeted using their finite budget They developed and ...
• Rewarding Service or Sales? 1st March 2013 Should employees be rewarded for delivering the experience that the customer wants, or the outcome that their employer needs? Having experienced two different car showrooms in 48 hours, it made me wonder why car dealers are so bad at customer service. Personally I find buying a car a stressful rather than enjoyable experience. I think that comes down to a lack of trust, and an instinct that the car dealer pretends to be interested in your ...
• Using customer experience to differentiate in a commodity market 14th March 2013 Great to see Shell UK being announced as the winner of the Customer Experience category in the Chartered Institute of Marketing awards for 2012. Too often companies complain about operating in a commodity market and being unable to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Shell have broken the mould by considering the whole customer experience and have been able to demonstrate how this can drive sales growth even in the toughest market and competitive conditions. Too often ...
• Where does customer effort fit? 6th June 2013 The Henley Centre for Customer Management (HCCM) recent report on how effective customer effort is as a measure of customer experience is well worth a read. But is effort or ‘ease of doing business’ just yet another part of the jigsaw when trying to identify how to measure the customers experience? HCCM define customer effort as a customers’ perception of the amount of time and energy that they have to spend in an encounter with ...