TLF Gems

At the beginning of 2021 we launched a new online course taking participants step by step through the always-popular topic of Customer Journey Mapping. In this episode Greg quizzes Stephen about what the course covers, what learners can expect, and why we created the course. If you’re interested, you can find out more at https://www.tlfresearch.com/online-customer-journey-mapping-course/&#82...

The foundation of a loyalty strategy is that customer satisfaction pays, in the long term, but can we prove it? It can be difficult to come up with an overall number (like “5% more satisfaction equates to £1,000,000 more profit”), but what’s often easier is to isolate specific mechanisms by which satisfaction contributes to increased… Continue reading How Satisfaction Pays

It’d be pretty hypocritical if we didn’t survey our own clients, wouldn’t it? Every year we conduct our own survey to help make sure we understand our clients and are able to meet their needs, even (or especially) when events like the global pandemic change so much. Greg and Stephen discuss the timing of the… Continue reading TLF Client Survey

In the latest edition of Customer Insight, our feature article is based on an interview that Stephen conducted with Tina Hobart and James Maguire from Mitie. In it they discuss the combination of customer research and account management, driven by top level commitment to the customer, that has led to a rapid improvement in Mitie’s… Continue reading Mitie’s NPS Success Story

What is trust, can you measure it, and do you need to in order to understand your customer relationships properly? In this episode Greg and Stephen talk about the webinar “Measuring Trust” (which is running again in July: https://www.tlfresearch.com/measuring-trust/ ), and why trust is crucial to predicting how customers will react when things go wrong.

Greg interviews Stephen about his new book Your Customer Survey: Using Research To Build A Distinctive Customer Experience. Who’s it for, what’s it about, and what makes it different to all the other customer experience books that are out there? If you’re interested you can buy the paperback from TLF Research and there is also… Continue reading Book Launch: Your Customer&#1...

Greg quizzes Stephen about his recent webinar on “The New Customer Experience Landscape 2021”. What have we seen in 2020 which is going to lead to lasting change? Stephen argues that qualitative research is more vital now than it’s ever been, and that the three big themes for 2021 are Culture, Sustainability, and Empathy. If… Continue reading The New Customer Experience Lan...

Greg and Stephen talk about turning research insight into action to improve the customer experience, based on Greg’s recent webinar. Action is hard not because it’s unclear what needs to happen, but because of the power of the status quo. The decisions you make before and during your survey can be more important than what… Continue reading Insight into Action

Greg and Stephen discuss the challenges of using customer journey mapping in business to business markets, based on Stephen’s recent webinar. Are B2B relationships different, and if they are what does that mean for the journeys we map, and the tools we use to do it?

In the second of our episodes featuring Chris Barnham, Stephen and Chris discuss in more detail how to use “qualitative semiotics” to explore how customers understand brand meaning. They talk about the importance of identity and qualification, and how to use a propositional hierarchy to think about the way your brand is perceived. Stephen and… Continue reading The interview: Chri...

It’s another interview episode, the first of a two-parter with qualitative researcher and semiotician Chris Barnham. In part 1 Chris gives an in-depth overview of the field, and explains his view that the theory of semiotics advanced by Charles Peirce can be be more helpful than Saussurian semiotics when it comes to understanding how consumers… Continue reading The interview: Chris Bar...

Stephen and Greg chat about benchmarking customer survey scores, picking up on some of the points in Greg’s webinar on the subject. What is benchmarking good for? Is it a distraction, a vanity exercise, or can it be used as a source of improvement?

Greg and Stephen catch up with TLF Research Client Manager Vicki Harris to talk about the impact of the pandemic and lockdown on customer experience and ways of working, with a particular eye on the social housing sector in the UK. Along the way we talk about the power of “moments of kindness” in a… Continue reading Social Housing, Covid-19 & Customer Experience

We got there! Thanks to anyone who’s been with us all the way from Chapter 1 (and if you haven’t, feel free to back and start at the beginning!) In the final chapter we discuss how getting your research design right makes your analysis and outcomes easier, why you still need to work hard to… Continue reading Customer Satisfaction Ch.18: Conclusions

It’s surprisingly common for organisations to gather information from customers through research, but never “close the loop” by communicating the results or actions being taken back to customers. It’s an essential part of the process, helping manage perceptions and making sure customers notice the changes you’re making. As Greg and Stephen comment, there’s no su...

You can’t improve the customer experience without getting people throughout the organisation to sign up to the changes that need to be made. They need the right information, the opportunity to contribute, and communications that will help drive it through. Stephen and Greg talk about how things have moved on since the book was written,… Continue reading Customer Satisfaction Ch.16: Inv...

A lot of organisations devote cost, time, and effort to measuring customer satisfaction, but many find it difficult to transform what they learn into decisive change for customers. Customer perceptions are slow to change, and organisational inertia can make it difficult for planned improvements to stick. How can your research help? Greg and Stephen chat… Continue reading Customer Satisfactio...

To use satisfaction data strategically, you need to understand how to link it to internal performance and customer behaviour. Those links often turn out to be non-linear, and understanding that can be crucial to seeing the value of investing in the customer experience. Greg and Stephen discuss how to think strategically about customer satisfaction, the… Continue reading Customer Satisfaction...

Benchmarking satisfaction is often an expensive red herring. It can distract the organisation from focusing on what really matters to customers, and obscure the truth that being the best of a bad bunch means that you’re vulnerable to disruption and missing out on the benefits of having really satisfied customers. Greg and Stephen talk about… Continue reading Customer Satisfaction Ch.13...

It’s very easy to get too focused on the customer research process; to concentrate so hard on the details you need to get right in order to produce valid and robust insight that you lose sight of the most important thing of all – what are you going to do to improve? Greg and Stephen… Continue reading Customer Satisfaction Ch.12: Actionable Outcomes

One of the best things about establishing a robust customer satisfaction survey process is that it will give you a good measure of how your performance changes over time. Greg and Stephen discuss what you should measure, how often, and what sample sizes you need to reach reliable conclusions. Along the way they discuss butterflies… Continue reading Customer Satisfaction Ch.11: Monitoring Per...

This is the second part of our interview with customer service expert Chris Daffy, this time focusing on his top tips for organisations that want to excel in terms of the customer experience. We talked about the emotional basis of loyalty, the importance of conviction leaders, and how to go about making sure you have… Continue reading The Interview: Chris Daffy (Part 2)

Chris Daffy has earned a tremendous reputation in the world of customer service, so it was a privilege to have the chance to pick his brains. There was too much good stuff to squeeze into one episode, so we’ve made this one a two-parter. We’re also really happy that Chris has agreed to headline our Customer Insight… Continue reading The Interview: Chris Daffy (Part 1)

We’re planning a series of interview episodes to catch up with people across the world of customer experience and insight. For our first in the series we spoke to Ian Golding. We’ve known and worked with Ian for many years, so it was really good to catch up with him and hear his views on… Continue reading The Interview: Ian Golding

This time Greg and Stephen discuss chapter ten of “Customer Satisfaction”, the basic analysis you need for a customer satisfaction survey to give you an accurate measure and clear priorities. You need to know when to use a mean or median, what the standard deviation tells you, and how to use correlation in order to… Continue reading Customer Satisfaction Ch.10: Basic Analysis