Insights
Evidence over opinion
Perspectives on customer experience research, analytics, and advisory, and how to turn experience data into decisions you can defend.
When to Use Synthetic Data
Synthetic data earns its place when real customer data is too scarce, too sensitive, or too slow to move, and only when you can prove the copy behaves like the original.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Experience to Impact: Turning CX Data Into Revenue
Most experience programs measure feeling and hope it pays off. The ones that compound do the opposite: they start from the money and work back to the moments that move it.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Procurement Automation, Done as an Experience Problem
Agentic AI can run the routine buying that clogs procurement, but the value only lands when the design starts from the requester's experience and keeps humans at the gates that carry risk.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Knowledge That Answers Back: AI Assistants for Internal Expertise
An internal AI assistant is not a search box with a chat bubble. It is a governed layer over your knowledge that turns the firm's collective expertise into an answer every employee can reach in seconds.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Voice of the Citizen: Priorities From Structured Listening
Trust in government tracks one thing above almost all others: whether people feel they have a say. Structured listening turns that feeling into a ranked agenda you can fund and defend.
Elizabeth Blake Read → AI Agents in Customer Service: From Deflection to Resolution
The shift that matters is not chatbots answering faster. It is agents that resolve, escalate with context, and learn from every contact, with humans placed where judgment pays.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Digital Government Metrics Worth Measuring
Page views tell you a service was visited. They never tell you whether a citizen got what they came for, which is the only metric that moves trust.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Claims Is the Moment of Truth. Agentic AI Decides Whether You Pass It.
The claim is where insurance loyalty is won or lost, and agentic AI is the first technology that can act across the whole claim instead of automating one step of it.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Citizen Experience: Why Trust in Government Runs Through the Service Counter
Trust in government is not won in speeches. It is earned, or lost, at the permit window, the benefits portal, and the call center, where satisfaction and trust move together.
Elizabeth Blake Read → AI Talent Screening: Scaling Hiring Without Scaling Bias
AI can screen candidates faster than any recruiter, but it screens them through the same lens it was trained on, and the wrong lens scales discrimination at machine speed.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Predictive Satisfaction: Modeling Sentiment Before It Is Measured
Survey response is collapsing and the silent majority is invisible. Predictive satisfaction models estimate how every customer or citizen feels, including the ones who never answer, so you can act before discontent surfaces.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Competitive Intelligence That Changes Decisions
Most competitive intelligence ends up in a deck nobody acts on. The programs that pay off are built backward from the decisions they are meant to change.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Root Cause Analysis for Customer Experience: Stop Treating Symptoms
When satisfaction drops or churn spikes, most teams patch the symptom. Root cause analysis finds the one driver that, once fixed, makes the problem go away and stay away.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Quant, Qual, and Where AI Actually Fits
The quant versus qual debate was never the real question. The real question is which decision you are trying to make, and AI changes the economics of answering it without changing the logic.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Building an Account Health Score That Predicts Churn
A health score is only worth building if it changes who your team calls on Monday morning. The ones that work start from the outcome they are meant to prevent, not the data that happens to be lying around.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Designing Surveys That Produce Real Insight
Most surveys fail before the first question is written, because no one decided what decision the answers were meant to inform.
Elizabeth Blake Read → What Journey Analytics Reveals
The score that predicts whether a customer stays is not how any single touchpoint feels. It is how the whole journey holds together, and most companies are still measuring the wrong thing.
Elizabeth Blake Read → How Customer Segmentation Improves Marketing ROI
Most segmentation projects produce slides, not lift. The ones that move ROI tie each segment to a different action, a different budget, and a measured return.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Predicting Customer Churn With Data
Most churn is decided long before the cancellation. The companies that keep customers are the ones that read the early signals and act while there is still something to save.
Elizabeth Blake Read → What Customer Experience Research Actually Tells You
Most CX research produces a number nobody can act on. The research that earns its keep does one thing: it names which experiences move loyalty and revenue, and proves it.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Customer Lifetime Value, Explained
CLV is not a marketing metric. It is the price you can afford to pay for a relationship, and the discipline that decides where every dollar of acquisition and retention spend should go.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Measuring Brand Awareness and Perception
Awareness gets you into the consideration set; perception decides whether you get chosen. The brands that grow measure both, on the same survey, and tie them to who actually buys.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Driver Analysis: Finding the Few Things That Move CX
Most experience teams act on the loudest feedback. Driver analysis tells you which factors actually move satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue, and by how much.
Elizabeth Blake Read → Brand Tracking: What It Is and How to Run It
Brand tracking only earns its budget when it stops reporting awareness and starts predicting the demand, pricing power, and share your brand will command next quarter.
Elizabeth Blake Read → No pieces in this area yet.