Michael Howlett

Most companies spend more acquiring customers than keeping them - that's where the money leaks. CX practitioner, not a consultant. I write CX Decoded.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

Watched a company pitch a "give back to the community" feature today. Their data says customers want easier access and faster service, not another program.
Leadership skipped the data, told a story instead: the time they cut a cheque to a local school and a parent cried.
Why does a good story beat real data every time it matters?

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

Field notes, Wednesday.

Asked a colleague if the exit surveys were still going out. No, she said, response rate got too low to bother. So the people angry enough to actually leave are also the ones we've quietly decided aren't worth asking anymore.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

Field notes, Wednesday.

Sat in on a session about redesigning a feedback dropdown. Someone suggested removing the "dissatisfied with service" option. Reason given: nobody ever picks it. Nobody picks it because the person filling out the form is the same person whose service gets rated. It's getting removed.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

Field notes, Monday. Sat in a meeting about how the meetings should work. Someone said, out loud, that we keep losing the point of what we're actually there to talk about. Nobody laughed. Everyone nodded. Then the meeting carried on exactly as before.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

Field notes, Monday. Spent forty minutes today replying to tickets about a button colour. Not choosing the colour. Explaining, in writing, whose job it is to choose it. Somewhere there's a customer who just wants to click the button.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

Field notes, Monday. A bank spends months writing governance documents defining who gets a say in how products get built. Risk. Compliance. Legal. Technology. Marketing. Six functions, all present and correct. Customer experience isn't one of them. Nobody debated it out. Nobody voted it off. It just never occurred to anyone that it needed to be there.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

@adrianswinscoe Trust and mistrust aren't two ends of the same scale. Trust builds slowly, in small increments over a long run of ordinary interactions going right. Mistrust just needs one bad experience and a policy written against you for the rest of your life.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

Most "inspired by" content is just the original post with the specifics filed off. I've had my own writing paraphrased back at me in an internal deck once, presented like a fresh insight. Nobody in the room clocked it because the point still worked, they'd just laundered the source out of it.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

@Hyken The listens-to-acts-upon gap is where most VoC programmes actually die. I've sat in enough of those reviews where the deck proves customers were heard and nobody can point to a single thing that changed because of it.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

Customers rarely complain before they leave. They just quietly start looking elsewhere the moment the experience stops matching what was promised. That moment is findable. Most businesses never go looking for it.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

"We apologise for the inconvenience" isn't rude. It's empty, a sentence you could paste onto any company, any outage, any decade, and change nothing.

The fix costs nothing and takes four sentences: https://t.co/xOAPJv0Ley

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

Every company says "customer obsessed" in the all-hands deck, then makes you fax a form to cancel. Pick one.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

@adrianswinscoe Most cost models treat every contact as the same unit. Break it down and it's usually one root cause eating a disproportionate share, uncosted because fixing it sits with a different team than the one who owns the KPI.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

@Hyken Convenience is the one expectation that never resets down. Once someone's had one-click, three-click feels broken. The uncomfortable bit: your competitor usually didn't get faster, they just made everyone else's slow process visible.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

@annettefranz The gap is rarely a mystery internally either. Someone flagged it in a survey, a QBR, an escalation email, months before the customer actually left. "Sudden" just means nobody wanted to be the one who acted on it in time.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

@BlakeMichelleM Test-and-learn is the right instinct, but travel has a brutal failure mode: a slightly wrong AI answer doesn't land in a controlled pilot group, it lands on someone at 6am with a missed connection. Curious how they're catching that before it ships wide.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

@Hyken The annoying part is none of those details show up on a dashboard individually. Someone gets hit by twelve small papercuts and the survey just says "poor experience," so the actual friction points never make it back to whoever could fix them.

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

Ran a customer forum for two years. Real insight, every session.

Then nothing. Nobody killed it. Nobody had to.

That's a special kind of bullshit. A no is a decision. This wasn't even that.

Anyone else built one of these? What happened to yours?

[Michael Howlett @BehavingCo]

Most complaint systems only count it as a complaint if someone says the word "complaint." Say "this is ridiculous" fifteen times, doesn't count. What's the dumbest rule your company enforces because some asshole signed off ten years ago and nobody's brave enough to kill it?