#NoBullshitCX #20yearsFuturelab “Don’t think. Ask!” Think you know your customers? Think again. When we started to work on a Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme for a large building materials producer, we arranged a kick-off workshop to develop the roll-out plan with a local team. Their sales manager confidently claimed: “We know what our customers want. They demand top quality, rapid delivery, and low prices. Until we have resolved our logistical issues and built a new factory, they will be unhappy.”But our VoC pilot painted a different reality. Turned out, customers could tolerate delays ..read more

#NoBullshitCX #20yearsFuturelab “Question (almost) everything.” Are you innovating “a faster horse”?A few years ago, I worked with the world leader in logistics supplies. They wanted to refresh their innovation process. Until then they typically interviewed all their customers once a year with a 200-question-long survey and held co-creation sessions with some of them. The process worked as such(although that questionnaire still makes me shudder). Unfortunately, they were creating insights and innovations in a very narrow field of vision this way. We needed to upend the process and see what was ..read more

#NoBullshitCX #20yearsFuturelab “Unhappy customers cost you more than you think.” A customer is worth more than you think. In my previous column, I mentioned the surprisingly high lifetime value of individual customers–once you really get an understanding of the whole picture. The first time I realized was in the early 2000s, when we designed customer experience strategy for a Japanese luxury car brand. When we ran workshops with the dealers to gather their input and discuss our ideas, their initial reaction was quite negative. “We have been selling cars here for a hundred years. Who are you t ..read more

#NoBullshitCX #20yearsFuturelab “Don’t stick to the seemingly obvious.” Feedback is not about the averages. When I presented customer feedback to a global leader in steel manufacturing, the management team was very happy with the overall scores (which were pretty decent). They were especially pleased with the page where we had grouped the results based on the contribution of the customers. The larger the contribution, the better the score! This is of course what we hoped to see: our biggest clients were the happiest ones. A group of customers that each contributed over a million margin per yea ..read more

“Just be honest.” It’s Valentine’s Day, so don’t throw tomatoes at me for this cheeky title, I am only joking. But am I though? It’s not the first time I used romantic analogies when getting CX concepts across. I called out “one-night brands” for not fulfilling their promises to the customers. I explained NPS by means of an old joke “I heard in the pub that you were a great lover”. I even likened Voice of theCustomer to marriage as opposed to dip-in-the-dating-pool approaches of marketing research. As the analogy seems to work, I want to take it to its ultimate conclusion: Most companies still ..read more

“Customers don’t bite. Most of them.” Talking to customers is vital for customer-centric product management. But for those who aren’t used to direct customer contact, it can be daunting. When I worked with a leading Greek bank, I trained a team of twenty or so product managers, giving them homework to do in between my visits so we could develop the new approach together. One of the tasks was “to talk to a few customers.”Each manager had to bring informal feedback from a couple of conversations to exchange and discuss. But when I returned, nobody–not one of them!–had talked to even a single cus ..read more

#NoBullshitCX #20yearsFuturelab “Just be honest.”  It’s Valentine’s day, so don’t throw tomatoes at me for this cheeky title, I am only joking.  But am I though? It’s not the first time I use romantic analogies when getting CX concepts across. I called out “one-night brands” for not fulfilling their promises to the customers. I explained NPS by means of an old joke “I heard in the pub that you were a great lover”. I even likened Voice of the Customer to marriage as opposed to dip-in-the-dating-pool approaches of marketing research.  As the analogy seems to work, I want to take ..read more

The Shifting Landscape In the not-so-distant past, market research teams were perceived only as information providers, distanced from the whirlwind of business-generating processes. Generating data and offering recommendations was their main job; the responsibility of actively driving change was outside of their scope. Whether core business would decide to act on the data or not, didn’t impact the KPIs of the ones who delivered the reports. Yet this is rarely the case any more. First, businesses started asking for actionable insights rather than just data: a new role that the researchers perfo ..read more

When I was on vacation in Cuba a few years ago, I had an interesting conversation with the bartender at my favorite bar on the beach. He asked me where I was from and what I did. When I explained what I do as a “CX consultant” – helping companies understand and better serve their customers – he said, “Oh, the exact same thing I do!” I had to laugh, but he was actually right. When he saw me arrive, he’d set out my favorite drink, and he had a perfect sense of whether I was in the mood for a conversation, or whether I’d rather ponder while gazing at the endless sea. Personalization of the custom ..read more

As those who follow me know, I am quite passionate about Voice of the Customer (VOC) Programmes being set up correctly to drive action, engagement and ROI. I have given many speeches, presented at least 50 webinars in 3 languages and given advice to dozens of companies around this topic. In 2020 we also dropped a first whitepaper around this. We have now published a fully revised and extended version of our whitepaper, which you can download here. Why this new version of the whitepaper? As the headline says, the majority of all VOC programmes are conceived and implemented in such a way that th ..read more