Martha Brooke

Customer interviews are an incredibly valuable research tool when used correctly. Satisfaction surveys (done well) are a great way to collect facts about your customers. The problem is, no matter how good they are, they don’t capture your customers’ complex thoughts and feelings—about you, your marketplace and your industry. To get a detailed picture of […]

Customer feedback surveys don’t have to be bad. But they often are. Case in point: I recently took a survey that began with this question: “Please rate the balance of graphics and text on our website.” What insights did the company hope to gain here? If a large number of respondents answered “Poor,” what would […]

Satisfaction survey mistakes are everywhere. It’s practically a given that every company will issue a customer satisfaction survey, but the old way of doing things isn’t working anymore. Customers are fed up with long surveys full of questions that don’t apply to them, and their responses to these surveys end up as useless numbers that […]

Customer service is an powerful tool that can support your brand or drag it down. Sometimes customer service reps do everything “right” but miss the point of your brand entirely. You work hard to define your brand, but if you ignore the capabilities of customer service to communicate your company’s values, you miss a crucial […]

If you’re going to use a phone survey, you should listen to what your customers say. While this may seem intuitive, it happens less than you might think. Last week at 8 PM, one of the top 4 car rental agencies called to survey me about my most recent experience renting from them. Since I […]

Measuring empathy is the remedy for fixing bad customer service interactions. Here’s an example of customer service gone awry. In this past Sunday’s The Haggler, David Segal. “When Your Longest Call Is the One to Correct the Bill.” The New York Times, August 14, 2014, David Segal covered a particularly bad customer service experience with AT&T. To […]

By now, you’re probably one of the millions of people who have heard Comcast’s current call from H***. And while the spotlight is on Comcast, Michelle deHaaff correctly points out in her blog that an incident like this “could be happening in your company right now.” One Step Further We’d take this a step further. […]

Martha is speaking during the closing keynote panel of Customer Service Experience (part of Customer Solutions Expo) at the Marriott Marquis in New York on Wednesday August 20, 11:45 AM. Along with Esteban Kolsky of ThinkJar, R. Wang of Constellation Research, Kate Leggett of Forester Research, she’ll be discussing the future of customer service. From […]

NPS is a tired, generic question. Some may argue that it’s simply an issue of implementation. In a recent interview, Richard Owen, CEO of Satmetrix, said that companies who don’t see benefits from improving their Net Promoter Score (NPS) are probably not measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS) correctly. He says poor sampling is to blame: […]

The team at Interaction Metrics loved Bob Thompson’s Hooked on Customers. We thought the overall premise—that companies need more than “strategies,” they need the right habits—is correct. As customer experience auditors, we come across lots of companies who pride themselves on satisfaction, but what counts is execution, day in and day out. Bob drives this […]

Last Updated: June 16, 2025 Never a day goes by that I don’t receive a survey request—sometimes multiple ones. I bet that’s true for you too. In 2013, SurveyMonkey processed approximately 1 million survey responses per day. By 2014, that number had already more than doubled to 2.2 million per day. And now? By 2025, SurveyMonkey […]

This Sunday in The Haggler David Segal. “In a Stock Trade, It’s Man vs. Machine.” New York Times, April 27, 2014, David Segal looked at a situation in which a computer misunderstood human language. We’re not surprised. As we’ve said before, customer experiences are complex, so computers don’t always get it. In this particular case, […]