Who Owns the Answer?
As colleagues start querying customer feedback themselves, the insight team's job shifts from producing the answer to guaranteeing everyone gets the same one.
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Who Owns the Answer?
As colleagues start querying customer feedback themselves, the insight team's job shifts from producing the answer to guaranteeing everyone gets the same one.
AI-Inflated Complaints
The cost of complaining has collapsed and the cost of handling it has skyrocketed. Every complaints process assumed effort meant sincerity. That just went pop.
What 26,119 pieces of customer feedback couldn't tell us
Explain ran a four-day deliberative sprint with 27 Northumbrian Water customers while we analysed 26,119 pieces of their feedback alongside it. Fourteen of the group's 45 ideas had no trace in the data at all.
How to Measure Trust Properly
The seven weighted drivers of trust everyone cites were measured on B2B buyers who could walk away. If your customers can't, you're navigating one country with a map of another.
Align Your Insight for Design
Your customers aren't rating your front desk — they're rating your kitchen. Service design is a whole craft built for the thing your insight keeps wishing it could do, and most of us were never taught it.
The Agentic Customer
AI agents are about to start shopping, comparing and complaining on your customers' behalf — and the machine only deals in averages. What happens to the humans it can't hear?
The Customer Ledger
Every interaction is a credit or a debit — and the customers about to leave stop paying in long before they say a word.
Your Insight Is Fine. You Just Don't Have a Process for Action.
The problem was never your data. It's that nobody owns the step between an insight and someone changing the work.
There You Are, Bernard: The Perfect Balanced Sample
What Yes Minister can teach you about how the wording of a question quietly decides its answer.
Why Wordnerds is the value multiplier for your Medallia investment
What Medallia does brilliantly, what it doesn't, and how CX teams are pairing it with a specialist Voice of Customer layer.
Power BI Is Marmite (and Why Copilot Alone Can't Help)
Dashboards split the room and AI chat won't save you — the real reason insight tools stall at a quarter of the workforce.
Demographics Tell You Who. They Don't Tell You Why.
Why age-and-postcode segments keep letting you down, and what to segment on instead.
High-Effort Customers Don't Complain. They Disappear.
Why effort, not satisfaction, is the metric that flags the customers about to quietly walk away.
Structural Equation Modelling: The Score Went Down, Anyone Know Why?
The stats technique that tells you which drivers actually moved your score — and which just moved alongside it.
Who Is Liable When AI Gets It Wrong?
As AI starts making customer decisions, the uncomfortable question of who carries the can when it gets one wrong.
The Empty Chair Fallacy
Why “representing the customer” in the room is harder, and riskier, than leaving a chair empty for them.
You Can't Improve What You Can't Compare
A score on its own tells you almost nothing. Benchmarking is what turns it into something you can act on.
The Death of Surveys and the Silent Signal Assassin
Why 2026 belongs to the signals customers leave without being asked — and what that means for your survey programme.
2025: Losers & Lessons
A look back at the year's biggest customer-experience faceplants, and what the rest of us should take from them.
The Great Bifurcation
Service is splitting into cheap-and-automated versus premium-and-human — and the middle is the dangerous place to sit.
Bob Moesta Made Us Rethink Everything
What Jobs to be Done did to our assumptions about why customers really do what they do.
Your CFO Thinks You're Making It Up
How to turn “customers seem happier” into a number your finance director will actually sign off on.
The Outer Loop Nobody Explains
Everyone talks about closing the loop with the customer. Almost nobody explains the bigger loop that actually fixes the business.
Articles by Pete Daykin
Who Owns the Answer?
As colleagues start querying customer feedback themselves, the insight team's job shifts from producing the answer to guaranteeing everyone gets the same one.
AI-Inflated Complaints
The cost of complaining has collapsed and the cost of handling it has skyrocketed. Every complaints process assumed effort meant sincerity. That just went pop.
What 26,119 pieces of customer feedback couldn't tell us
Explain ran a four-day deliberative sprint with 27 Northumbrian Water customers while we analysed 26,119 pieces of their feedback alongside it. Fourteen of the group's 45 ideas had no trace in the data at all.
How to Measure Trust Properly
The seven weighted drivers of trust everyone cites were measured on B2B buyers who could walk away. If your customers can't, you're navigating one country with a map of another.
Align Your Insight for Design
Your customers aren't rating your front desk — they're rating your kitchen. Service design is a whole craft built for the thing your insight keeps wishing it could do, and most of us were never taught it.
The Agentic Customer
AI agents are about to start shopping, comparing and complaining on your customers' behalf — and the machine only deals in averages. What happens to the humans it can't hear?
The Customer Ledger
Every interaction is a credit or a debit — and the customers about to leave stop paying in long before they say a word.
Your Insight Is Fine. You Just Don't Have a Process for Action.
The problem was never your data. It's that nobody owns the step between an insight and someone changing the work.
There You Are, Bernard: The Perfect Balanced Sample
What Yes Minister can teach you about how the wording of a question quietly decides its answer.
Why Wordnerds is the value multiplier for your Medallia investment
What Medallia does brilliantly, what it doesn't, and how CX teams are pairing it with a specialist Voice of Customer layer.
Power BI Is Marmite (and Why Copilot Alone Can't Help)
Dashboards split the room and AI chat won't save you — the real reason insight tools stall at a quarter of the workforce.
Demographics Tell You Who. They Don't Tell You Why.
Why age-and-postcode segments keep letting you down, and what to segment on instead.
High-Effort Customers Don't Complain. They Disappear.
Why effort, not satisfaction, is the metric that flags the customers about to quietly walk away.
Structural Equation Modelling: The Score Went Down, Anyone Know Why?
The stats technique that tells you which drivers actually moved your score — and which just moved alongside it.
Who Is Liable When AI Gets It Wrong?
As AI starts making customer decisions, the uncomfortable question of who carries the can when it gets one wrong.
The Empty Chair Fallacy
Why “representing the customer” in the room is harder, and riskier, than leaving a chair empty for them.
You Can't Improve What You Can't Compare
A score on its own tells you almost nothing. Benchmarking is what turns it into something you can act on.
The Death of Surveys and the Silent Signal Assassin
Why 2026 belongs to the signals customers leave without being asked — and what that means for your survey programme.
2025: Losers & Lessons
A look back at the year's biggest customer-experience faceplants, and what the rest of us should take from them.
The Great Bifurcation
Service is splitting into cheap-and-automated versus premium-and-human — and the middle is the dangerous place to sit.
Bob Moesta Made Us Rethink Everything
What Jobs to be Done did to our assumptions about why customers really do what they do.
Your CFO Thinks You're Making It Up
How to turn “customers seem happier” into a number your finance director will actually sign off on.
The Outer Loop Nobody Explains
Everyone talks about closing the loop with the customer. Almost nobody explains the bigger loop that actually fixes the business.
