Martha Brooke
Why You Need a Closed-Loop Survey—and How to Do It!
I founded Interaction Metrics in 2004 because I felt like companies weren’t listening. Simple requests were rewarded by silence. And if I had an issue or question, rote ‘sorry for the inconvenience’ was often the reply. I figured if this was happening to me, it…
Not Another Word Cloud—Please!
Geoff Colvin writes in ‘The Simple Metric That’s Taking Over Big Business’ (May 2020, Fortune magazine) the star of Net Promoter is its follow-up question, usually stated as something like ‘How could we improve? Or, ‘Why did you give that score?’ Colvin cites Marc Stein,…
Are You Begging For a Thank You With Your Email Survey?
Every day, everywhere, companies send email surveys, smiley face surveys, or call to request our customer feedback. It’s overwhelming. However, as we enter the holiday season, let’s acknowledge that when an associate is incredibly helpful, it’s nice to...
How to Ace Your DIY Customer Satisfaction Survey
The prevalence of Survey Monkey and other DIY survey platforms has made it cheap and easy to implement customer satisfaction surveys. And while these platforms might be right for you, before you jump in, hit pause and think your DIY strategy through.Wi...
List of the 20 MOST Common Survey Flaws
Picture Source: Interaction Metrics This morning, my rep texted me from the shop where my car is serviced:“You’ll receive a survey from us. It would mean a lot to me if you completed it. We hope you recommend us.” I get what he wants, but…
Want to Improve the Patient Experience? Stop Sending Bad Surveys
Source: 123rf.com In the United States, healthcare is a $3.5 trillion a year market and employs 1 in 8 Americans. For a market with huge impact and under tremendous scrutiny, you would expect medical organizations to take an interested, data-driven ...
Here Are the 5 Essential Standards of Customer Listening
Image source: pexels.com In the last decade I’ve seen and run a lot of Customer Listening programs. Here’s the one thing I know for sure: good Customer Listening always meets the same 5 standards. Meeting these standards achieves dependable, high-ins...
Interactive Data is the Future, Here’s Why
Image source: pexels.com Interactive Data Motivates Teams Measuring the customer experience is crucial, but visualizing that measurement with interactive data is equally important. Here’s why: dynamic data motivates teams to take action and f...
Gallup Says Engagement Matters, What Are You Doing About It?
For years, Gallup Research has reported on the impact of employee engagement on profits. Meanwhile, they’ve also reported on the dismal state of employee engagement; employees simply don’t care about their work as much as employers would hope. For inst...
Want Feedback? Make It So Simple a Kid Could Do It
I like taking customer surveys and do so nearly every time I have useful feedback to share. Perhaps it’s because I’m in the survey business. Or perhaps it’s because I like to feel “heard” as a customer. Either way, I’m a sucker for a survey.…
How to Use a Research Mindset to Avoid Huge Survey Blunders
Listening to your customers is smart—as long as you ask thoughtful questions that elicit useful insights. Unfortunately, when it comes to customer surveys, too many companies go through the motions, conducting customer surveys just to say they did it. ...
How to Shorten Your Survey and Avoid Junk Data
Peter Drucker famously quipped “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” and that’s especially true when it comes to feedback from your customers. But what if your surveys are so long they distort your metrics? Or, suppose only outliers take you...
Answering NPR: Why 5-Star Rating Systems Don’t Work
On NPR’s Morning Edition, Jan 8, 2019, social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam, discussed an issue that should be top of mind for any company that uses 5-star rating systems. According to NYU professor John Horton who researched online marketpla...
How to Invite the Most Honest Customer Feedback
Today’s Case Study: SurveyGizmo Do you have time for a survey? Can you give us some feedback? Tell me how I did! We are all too familiar with customer feedback requests as they bombard us from every side: email signatures, website pop-u...
5 Ways to Improve Your Customer Service Chat—Today!
There are many modes of customer service (phone, in-person, email, etc.). But, when done well, chat is by far the best. It reduces customer effort, increases customer satisfaction and answers customers’ questions quickly. Plus, it’s less costly than the phone, is more immediate than email,...
Ready to Get ROI on Your Great Customer Service? Think “Conversionally”
Whenever I run a webinar on how to drive ROI from customer experience, I get an unusually high number of registrants. This leads me to believe that while there are more customer experience (cx) roles than ever before, customer experience itself is not seen...
How to Make your Survey Better than Nordstrom, Lowe’s, and Wal-Mart
I know you get asked to take surveys all the time, because I do. Even the shortest business trip results in at least 5 surveys: Delta wants to know about your flight; Hilton wants to know about your stay; Enterprise asks about your car...
One Concept that Improves All Your Customer Service Interactions
In the US market alone, there are hundreds of customer service consultants offering thousands of customer service improvement strategies which begs the question: does anyone need yet another customer service improvement plan? I think, decidedly, yes, for the simple reason that most customer service...
6 Steps to Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Surveys
I’ll be moderating conversations about VoC at next week’s Operations Summit and it got me thinking… It’s practically a given that every company will issue a customer satisfaction survey as part of their VoC program. But it’s NOT a given that every survey will...
3 Ways to Get More from Your Mystery Shops
At conferences, I’m often asked about mystery shopping, and it got me thinking: there are a lot of misunderstandings about what mystery shopping can and can’t do. Some see mystery shopping as a simple check-in; others see it as too artificial for an accurate customer...