MyCustomer’s 10 most popular articles of 2022

The most-read lists on MyCustomer are very often a product of their time - whether it's social media customer service dominating proceedings in 2012's list, GDPR's strong influence in 2018 or the pandemic in 2020's list. 

This year was no different. A cursory glance through the most popular pieces from the past 12 months provide a perfect picture of the here and now: in particular, dealing with inflationary pressures, changing working arrangements or corporate crises. We've covered the lot this year, and all of it with a view to helping customer service and CX leaders navigate the ever-changing business landscape. 

So, without further ado, here are the top 10 stories that piqued your interest in 2022:

1. What Netflix’s customer retention crisis teaches us about CX

For the first time in a decade, the world’s most popular streaming platform lost subscribers. 200,000  in the first three months of 2022, in fact! The impact? $200 billion wiped from their stock market valuation in six months, and 150 US-based jobs cut. Chattermill's Mikhail Dubov explored what had gone wrong at the streaming giant and what we could learn about customer retention. 

2. Will NPS 3.0 solve Net Promoter Score’s shortcomings?

Net Promoter Score would prove to be a popular topic on MyCustomer in 2022 - as indeed it is most years! But 2022 would turn out to be particularly special for NPS as it was the year that Fred Reichheld and the team behind the metric would announce Net Promoter 3.0 - a new complementary metric to address some of the complaints levelled at NPS. Neil Davey took a look at the new metric and its implications for CX measurement. 

3. Has Salesforce lost its way?

Our readers sure do like picking through the bones of a corporate crisis - as if Netflix's troubles weren't enough, this piece exploring a perceived 'wobble' at CRM giant Salesforce also proved very popular. Digging into a Nucleus Research report, this article detailed why the analysts were calling out Salesforce for decreasing value and customer satisfaction, and concluding that it was no longer a leader in the CRM market.

4. What to do if your customers are complaining about your prices

With the cost-of-living crisis having a dramatic impact on operational costs, businesses were being forced to raise their prices. Inevitably, this was accompanied by complaints about price rises. Keeping prices stable isn't always possible, of course. So in this article, Colin Shaw explored how can organisations could respond - and even respond in a way that could actually improve the customer experience.

5. What I learned about customer contact strategy from reading 10,000 service webchats

Pulling out stories from the likes of Sky, HSBC, British Gas and Tesco, Andrew Moorhouse used his consumer experiences to showcase what he sees happening in the marketplace, portraying the death of live chat and how companies are starting to rethink their entire customer contact strategy. 

6. Would a four-day week improve or impair customer service?

In June, a pilot programme launched in the UK to explore the potential benefits of a four-day working week for employees, exploring its impact on areas such as stress, job and life satisfaction, health and energy use. In this piece, Neil Davey debated whether a four-day working week would benefit customer service - or damage customer experiences.

7. How customer service teams can help tackle the loneliness epidemic in 2022

In a global Statista study conducted at the end of last year, it was revealed that roughly a third of all adults experience feelings of loneliness in their day to day lives. According to Gartner, the effects of the loneliness epidemic are set to be felt acutely by customer service teams too – especially in contact centres - predicting that by 2026, 75% of customers who call customer service and support will do so out of loneliness, not because they have a customer service issue. Chris Ward explores what organisations can do to ensure they're combatting this challenge in a sincere and effective manner.

8. Six reasons why standard CX thinking isolates it from the c-suite

Shortly before be passed away, the brilliant Jack Springman finished his wonderful book The Final Rant - Making Customer Experience A C-Suite Priority. In this abridged extract from this terrific tome, Jack listed six reasons why standard CX thinking will hold you back if you are trying to make customer experience a c-suite priority. Jack was one of the most popular contributors to MyCustomer, a brilliantly insightful writer about CX and - most important of all - a wonderful human being. He is much missed. 

9. NPS is still the best CX metric we have! Here's why....

Net Promoter Score has received a lot of criticism recently. But how reasonable - and accurate - are the complaints? Maurice Fitzgerald debunks some of the objections to NPS and explains why it remains the best customer experience metric. 

10. Guru proposes new CX metric to replace NPS - will it prove popular?

We told you NPS was popular! While CX luminary Bruce Temkin is no NPS-basher (in fact he describes himself as a "moderate supporter"), he acknowledges there have always been concerns over the efficacy of the measure and the metric may have reached the end of its useful life. However, at the same time, he believes that we needn't entirely scrap the notion of an enterprise-wide customer experience metric - and has proposed the True Loyalty Measure (TLM). Read this piece to find out what TLM is and how it improves upon NPS, according to Bruce.