Peter Leppik
You May Be P-Hacking and Don’t Even Know It
P-Hacking is a big problem. It can lead to bad decisions, wasted effort, and misplaced confidence in how your business works. P-Hacking sounds like something you do to pass a drug test. Actually, it's something you do to pass a statistical test. "P" re...
Designing Hybrid Surveys
There's two elements to designing a hybrid survey program which combines the depth of actionable feedback from a live-person phone interview with the ability to cost-effectively collect huge sample sizes with an online survey. In this article I'll...
Customer Experience Non-Trends for 2018
It's the beginning of a new year, which means it's time for pundits and prognosticators to pull out their crystal balls and make predictions about the twelve months to come. Bruce Temkin, for example, has declared that the Customer Experience Theme for...
This Is Why Survey Design is Hard
Not everyone is going to immediately spot the problems I saw with this online survey I got from Discover Card this week. But some people will, especially those who have some knowledge of User Interface design. When designing this survey someone thought it would be...
Making the Company Human
If you are one of the lucky few who plunked down the equivalent of a four-year degree to buy a Tesla Model X, you probably already know about your car's special holiday light show. For those who haven't heard about this before, here's the video....
Why We Still Like Phone Interviews
While we at Vocalabs provide a variety of customer feedback channels to our clients, we still think phone interviews are often the most important tool when it comes to using customer feedback to actually drive change in an organization. That may sound strange in the...
Listening to Customers
Every company likes to say that it listens to customers. But when was the last time you literally listened to a customer? I've learned over the years that listening to customers--through audio recordings of interviews or direct conversation with customers--is one of the most powerful tools...
Incentives Run Amok
Here are three stories which have one thing in common: Several customers have reported being "fired" from their Ford dealer after providing less-than-perfect ratings on a customer survey. One customer, when he contacted his dealer about buying another new vehicle after his original purchase was...
A Tale of Two Airlines
This has been a bad week for United Airlines. After making news for having a paying customer dragged off a plane, bloody and unconscious, for refusing to accept $800 to take a later flight, another slightly-less-horrible story emerged of a United first-class customer who...
2016 NCSS Banking Results
We've published the 2016 results of the National Customer Service Survey on Banking. This ongoing research tracks the customer service quality at Bank of America, Chase, Citi, and Wells Fargo in a continuous data set going back to 2011. The most striking change in our...
Helpful Feedback
Imagine taking a college class, and at the beginning of the semester the Professor announces, "For this class, we're not going to be handing back any of your papers or exams, and we won't tell you any of your grades on individual assignments and...
Net Promoter Score (NPS) in B2B Surveys
If you're thinking about using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) on a business-to-business survey, there's some extra factors you should consider before committing to this metric. Net Promoter Score is a common, and somewhat controversial, measurement of a customer's relationship to a company. It's based...
Customer Experience Non-Trends for 2017
It's the beginning of a new year, which means it's time for pundits and prognosticators to pull out their crystal balls and make predictions about the twelve months to come. Bruce Temkin, for example, has identified "Purpose" as the Customer Experience theme of 2017. Who…
“Smart” Products vs. Services
It used to be that when you opened up your wallet, you knew whether you were buying a product or a service. New pair of shoes? Product. Haircut? Service. Trip to Disney World? Service. Mickey Mouse T-Shirt? Product. Knowing what you're getting is important for...
Falling Through the Cracks
Most companies can handle the ordinary customer service issues just fine. Often, the difference between a company with terrible service and great service is what happens when things go a little wrong. Do customers get their problems resolved quickly and painlessly, or do they...
Mistakes about Margin of Error
Pop quiz time! Suppose a company measures its customer satisfaction using a survey. In May, 80% of the customers in the survey said they were "Very Satisfied." In June 90% of the customers in the survey said they were "Very Satisfied." The margin of error...
Incentives
A few weeks ago the Harvard Business Review published an article with the provocative title, Stop Paying Executives for Performance. The main thesis was, as you might expect, that companies should stop paying executives for performance. The authors give a number of reasons: Performance-based pay...
NCSS Results: T-Mobile Keeps Getting Better, Comcast Still Trails
We just published the 2015 results for the National Customer Service Survey (NCSS) of Communications companies. This ongoing survey tracks customer service quality at AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast, DirecTV, Dish Network, Sprint, T-Mobile, Time Warner, and Verizon. In this year's data we find that T-Mobile has...
NCSS Results: Chase on top, Bank of America Improves
We just published the results for the National Customer Service Survey (NCSS) on Banking for 2015. This is our ongoing syndicated research program comparing the customer service at four major consumer banks: Bank of America, Chase, Citi, and Wells Fargo. For the NCSS we interview...
Sharing Feedback, Constructively
Back when I was is college I took a creative writing class, and part of this class was to critique each other's work: read what the other students wrote, and offer constructive criticism and feedback. It turned out that was one of the hardest...