Martha Brooke, CCXP

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-ups, phone queues (“press 1 after this call to …”), even the grocery gal circles a survey she’d like us to take at the bottom of the receipt.

There are many modes of customer service (phone, in-person, email, etc.). But, when done well, customer service 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, and it amplifies conversion by showing up on your website just when customers are about to bail.

Getting an ROI on your great customer service is an important goal for any company. Customer Experience Helps ROI 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 […]

Last Updated: May 14, 2025 This study examined 51 major US retailers’ surveys collected June–July 2016. The examples describe those surveys at that time, not the retailers’ current practices. Survey Overload I know you get asked to take customer feedback surveys all the time, because I do. Even the shortest business trip results in at […]

Jerry Sokol writes for Biz Meets Tech, and he recently wrote about something that’s always top of mind at Interaction Metrics—good customer experience metrics. Metrics are only useful insofar as they help you improve—simply tracking outcome scores or collecting data and calling it done is never the answer. The right customer experience metrics don’t just […]

Today I’m pleased to share a guest post by Ian Golding. Ian drives home the critical point that customer experience metrics are essential to transforming experiences. It’s always great to share ideas about how improve customer service from like-minded thinkers. When it comes to the profession that Customer Experience has now become, one of the […]

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. What Is It Good For? Mystery shopping has tremendous value for B2B as well as B2C, and is vital to a thoughtful and well-vetted customer service evaluation. Obviously, mystery […]

While there are a lot of common errors in customer satisfaction surveys, I recently experienced a particularly egregious one: fake customer survey data. Fake Customer Survey Data Example Our company recently began working with a website optimization service. As the introductory phone call drew to a close, our new account manager asked me to take […]

Last updated: May 4, 2026 Here is a question every CX leader should be able to answer: What did you do differently because of your last survey? If you did nothing, your measurement program is more decorative than real. What goes undiscussed in most CX conversations is that companies aren’t failing because they lack data. […]

Last Updated: June 5, 2025 Companies obsess over survey scores. But the real gold—the part where customers actually say what they think—is buried in the open-ended responses. These unstructured comments are where customers vent, explain, and suggest. It’s where emotion and insight live. And yes, of course, most companies look at them, usually plugging them […]

Last Updated: February 17, 2026 Open-ended survey analysis is the systematic process of transforming unstructured text feedback into quantifiable, actionable data. While closed-ended scores (like NPS) track “what” is happening, open-ended analysis explains “why” by identifying specific customer pain points, emotions, and unmet needs. According to Forrester, even a one-point improvement in a large organization’s […]

Great customer service is something that sticks with you for years. Not too long ago, while checking into a hotel on a damp San Francisco night, the front desk clerk noticed my sniffling and asked if I wanted chicken soup. “That’d be great,” I replied, assuming it was just a sympathetic comment and not an […]