Our blog
WFH – is video conferencing enough?
For ten years we’ve been researching and tracking office workers’ use of video conferencing and chat. Now it has become synonymous with the new working from home (WFH) practices that Covid-19 has forced many to adopt. Editorials have been written in praise of video, although doubts about its role remain for some. In the past, remote…
Market research in business – social media
We are constantly reminded that we live in a networked world with the twenty-first century being hailed as the Networked Age. However, in The Square and the Tower Niall Ferguson argues that social networks are nothing new. He characterises the network outsider as suspicious of a world controlled by powerful and exclusive networks…
What’s your view on taking loyalty penalties public?
It’s no secret that customers don’t trust organisations the way they used to. In customer research, we often see over-simplified questions about trust, yet questions about loyalty, particularly loyalty penalties, feature less often. Is this because businesses are too nervous to ask, as they might not like the answers?
Recruiting and supporting Customer Service Managers, with no industry experience
Whilst it is increasingly recognised that frontline customer-facing employees are responsible for delivering an organisation’s strategy, the development programmes designed for frontline customer service management have often failed to deliver the improvements
Do consumers prefer text-activated or voice-activated chatbots?
When we talk about ‘chatbots’, we often conflate two different things: text-activated and voice-activated bots. It sounds trite to point out that they are, in fact, very different! Indeed, it’s rare to find a bot that can be activated by text and voice. So, given the...
What the latest Contact Centre Standard BS EN ISO 18295 tells you
Customer contact centres (CCCs) have an important role in the interaction between organizations and their customers. They vary in their levels of service quality and consumer protection, and work to many different levels of efficiency. BS EN ISO 18295-1 Customer...
6 steps – how thought leadership can energise B2B content marketing
We define thought leadership as research that has original insights which challenge industry thinking. Thought leadership is a catalyst to new strategies and whilst it benefits from the rise of content marketing it is also being challenged by it. The distinction...
Understanding data and statistics: six pieces of guidance
For those who are loyal listeners to Tim Harford’s More or Less programme on Radio 4, Professor David Spiegelhalter will be a familiar name. He is often interviewed to help listeners make sense of controversial or contradictory statistical results. In a similar field,...
Why is customer service more popular than ever?
The promise of digital transformation was automation, simplification and reduced demand failure. Implicitly, and often explicitly, there has been a related prize for organisations providing products and services – that of less need for expensive, people resourced,...
Using research to steer through these uncertain times
Market research is needed in times of uncertainty
Why are we witnessing the ‘averagisation’ of customer service?
Originally published in MyCustomer Consumer perceptions of customer service offered by most businesses across most sectors are broadly similar and middling – in other words, undifferentiated. Why is this? And what does it mean for your company? Big businesses have...
Strategies for researching CX opportunities in 2019
We live in exceptionally unstable times. To succeed, businesses need to invest in understanding and meeting their current customers’ future needs as well as finding cost-effective ways to attract new customers. As consumers, we pay for organisations’ products and services – our spending is their sales and revenue …
Why great thought leaders are great and PR-aped opinion leadership is not
Bill Gates commented that Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness: Ten Reason We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things are Better Than You Think "is one of the most important books I’ve ever read”. He describes this brilliant book as an “indispensable guide to thinking...
After 7 years, how is the Internet of Things changing customer experience?
In 2011 we wrote about how Internet of things technology would impact customer experience in “The Big Switch – How customer service is becoming smart” . Back then, (and in this follow-up report) we identified several drivers which we thought would smooth the way for IoT technology:
Algorithms and Big Data: Are they enough to make good business decisions?
Informally, an algorithm is a set of instructions that transforms inputs into outputs. However without us noticing, and combined with big data, they have taken over modern life. From airport runways, to personalised advertising to even replicating the voice of Donald...
How can housing associations best use Smart home technology?
Smart home technology is a whole range of products that are changing the way we interact with our home and enable us to control factors like heating and lighting to even the functioning of doors. Coupled with the Internet of Things it includes sensors to monitor...
Getting the most out of market research for Voice of the Customer programmes
It is early summer 2018, organisations have more and more opportunities to adopt increasingly sophisticated ways to understand their customers whether its AI from language processing (such as chatbot feedback and text analytics) to data analytics (such as business...
Customers’ complaints – when there’s an IT fiasco
There have been days of disruption to TSB’s services after a planned migration to a new IT system went wrong. The new system was unable to handle the volume of users, and many customers were unable to check their accounts or monitor payments. The incident follows...
The central role of market research in proposition development
Market research is crucial for the success of developing new propositions. Findings from market research can drive proposition development at several stages of the process. At the earliest stage, research findings can be used to design the product or service...
Why market research is essential for understanding customers
The airline steward requested all phones should be switched off. It was this routine request, heard many times before, that alerted my travelling colleague to a problem. Suddenly, he had the unpleasant realisation he’d left his iPhone X in a duty-free shop back in the...