Hello Customer

Your customers already tell you what to fix in thousands of comments, tickets and reviews, but nobody has time to read them all. Hello Customer reads every one, in Dutch, French, German and 27 other languages, and ranks what to fix first.

Over the past two weeks, two CEOs—independent of each other—told me the same thing: EBITDA is a lagging indicator. Customer satisfaction and employee engagement are far more insightful. This isn't to say EBITDA doesn’t matter; rather, it always comes too late. It reflects what has already happened, not what is about to happen. A recent statement captures this perfectly: “If I have a strong EBITDA, I know I must have had satisfied customers. If I measure high customer satisfaction today, I know my future EBITDA will be strong.” This highlights the difference between lagging and leading indicators. EBITDA is the scoreboard. Customer and employee signals are the steering wheel. Strong organizations don’t choose between the two. They understand which metrics help them reflect on the past and which guide them forward. More info via www.hellocustomer.com

CX = broccoli. It's good for you, in many ways. Even if you cannot always calculate exactly HOW good it is for you. Companies invest in customer experience for good reasons. And yes, sometimes the ROI of those efforts can be demonstrated very clearly. A smoother onboarding, reduced effort, higher retention, lower costs. The ROI is clear, and you can build a business case that’s nice and clean. But often, CX is more like broccoli. You KNOW broccoli is good for you, but you’ll never know exactly how many extra days of life you gain from each bite you take. CX often works the same way. Some effects are measurable and visible, others quietly strengthen the business in ways that are hard to isolate. That’s why ROI in CX is rarely a single number. Put it like this: it can sometimes be hard to attribute the positive effects on your business directly to your CX efforts. Sometimes, it’s more like a pattern. A chain of evidence: - you listen, - you uncover friction, - teams improve the experience, - customers respond, - and the business feels the difference. Sometimes you can show the impact directly. Other times, the impact is still very real, but distributed across many interacting factors. That doesn’t make it any less valuable. It simply means CX is part of the fabric that keeps the organisation healthy. Not everything that counts can be calculated. But you can count on Hello Customer to do the measuring that matters for you. More info via www.hellocustomer.com

What if every customer comment was read, prioritised, and turned into an action plan automatically?

Some partnerships start with a coffee that lasts hours longer than anyone planned. Ours started on a rooftop in Riyadh. Last year, Michel Stevens from CXM Academy invited me to join him at a CX conference in Saudi Arabia. We hit it off — and kept talking. Michel has since become a regular guest on our CX Matters podcast, and we keep arriving at the same conclusion: the CX industry doesn't have a knowledge problem. It has an execution problem. Great insights die in dashboards. Trained professionals go back to organisations that aren't set up to act on what they've learned. The gap between knowing and doing is where most CX programs quietly fail. That's why I'm happy to announce that Hello Customer is now officially partnering with CXM Academy — to bring CX skills and CX tools closer together. CXM Academy builds the skills. Hello Customer provides the tools and the intelligence. Neither is worth much without the other. We're already cooking up more projects together. More to come. 🎧 CX Matters podcast: https://lnkd.in/eYSwNFRk Monetizing the Experience course: https://lnkd.in/ekYPSNRv

When people ask me how to “get everyone involved” in a Voice of the Customer programme, I usually say: don’t start with technology. Start with behaviour. The biggest barrier isn’t access to feedback. It’s the belief that feedback belongs to one team—or that it will be used to point fingers. If VoC feels like a monthly judgement, people avoid it. If it feels like a shared learning loop, people join. What helps: ➡️ Make it visible. Let teams see the voice of the customer in a way that fits their world. Executives want a clear link to priorities. Frontline teams want practical takeaways. Product wants recurring themes. Ops wants root causes. ➡️ Make it actionable. Choose a few priorities together. Don’t boil the ocean. Agree on ownership, and the next decision the feedback will influence. If there’s no action path, the energy fades fast. ➡️ Make it human. Mix data with real stories. A single comment can create empathy faster than a chart ever will. ➡️ Make it social. Run short cross-functional sessions where people solve one customer pain point together. Those moments build trust between departments—and that trust is what keeps VoC alive. VoC works best when it becomes a team sport. The goal isn’t perfect alignment. It’s steady collaboration. #VoC #CustomerFeedback #EmployeeExperience #CX