According to Forrester there are over 500 Billion, with a B, product opinion comments made each year. If you break that down to an average across those with access to the internet it ends up being about 250 comments per person or 100,000 comments a minute. But is there real time customer feedback hidden in those comments? Or does it just prove that there are some people out there with nothing better to do that make comments online?

Can you believe that the Holidays are already here? We've already survived the chaos that is Black Friday and while some of us are smiling following another successful customer stampede, others are left guessing what went wrong. Are the Holidays making your balance sheets smile or are you trying to figure out where you went wrong?

To efficiently compare your company's performance against others’ (benchmarking) you need to decide against whom should you be compared. Following is what is known as “The Chocolate Chip Phenomenon” often described by Jean Mork Bredeson, President, SERVICE 800.

The question now is, can you handle the truth? Measuring customer satisfaction can be a very daunting task whether you have 20 customers or 200,000. It is easy to over complicate strategies to find out what your customers really think about you, spending hours strategising how to conduct the study, how many people to ask, and even what to ask. At the end of the day there is only one rule that you should follow when exploring measuring customer satisfaction, start simple and just ask!

We monitor and track specific keywords each month to gain insight from trends and sentiment. Over the last few months we have seen an increase in negative sentiment associated with customer satisfaction surveys. This trend has revealed how important the design of customer feedback tools is.