Customer experience research when the scores look fine and people still leave.

Two things at once, and they compound. A satisfaction score measures the people who answered it, and anybody still willing to spend three minutes on your survey is by definition still spending goodwill on you. The customers who have decided to leave usually go quiet before they go, so they’re missing from that number, from the review site and from the support line as well. On top of that, a score is an average of steps, and people rarely remember an experience as an average. They keep the worst moment and the last one, and those two are what they tell the next person deciding whether to sign. That combination is how a company ends up with a healthy dashboard and a renewal problem in the same quarter. We recruit the people your channels were never going to reach, follow the journey where it actually happens rather than where it’s documented, and size what each friction costs against your own customer base.

Every quote is built for the project, because the variables move a great deal. How many markets and languages, how many touchpoints are in scope, whether the work is a usability round on one flow or a journey study across the whole relationship, whether we need time behind the line with the people who deliver the service, how hard the audience is to reach, which is very different for a consumer app than for a hospital ward or a depot at six in the morning, and what you need in your hands at the end. A moderated usability round in one market and a service blueprint across four countries with back-stage fieldwork are different projects with very different numbers. Most of our projects sit in the six-figure range. We scope after a proper conversation about the decision you’re making, and you get a fixed price and a timeline before any work begins.

Often because they were drawn in a workshop by people who know the service from the inside, so they show the steps the company controls, in the order the company delivers them. That’s useful as a shared language, but it can’t settle an argument, because nothing on the map is measured. It can’t tell you how many people hit a given moment, what it costs when they do, or which of two fixes is worth more, so the meeting tends to go to whoever argued hardest. We take the map you already have and treat it as what it is, a hypothesis worth checking. Then we go and check it: fieldwork with customers where the journey happens, the conversation they have about it when nobody is asking, and numbers that size each friction against your own customer base. You get the same map back with evidence attached, plus the moments that were never on it because nobody inside the building could see them.

We research it, we design the recommendation with you, and we don’t take over the build. In practice you get a blueprint of the service as it actually runs, front stage and back stage, each visible failure traced to the decision that caused it and the team that owns it, the promises the front of the service makes that the back was never built to keep, and a prioritised set of changes with what each one is worth. Co-creation sessions with your people and with real customers are part of that, and so is being in the room when the hard trade-offs get made. Building the thing belongs with your teams or with the design and technology partners you already work with, and we stay close enough while they do it to keep the reasoning intact. We say this plainly because the same two words cover both jobs in this industry, and the difference matters a great deal when you’re deciding who to brief.

That question is the deliverable. Answering it properly needs four things behind it: how many customers pass through the moment, how much it weighs for them when they do, what it costs to change, and who has to agree before anything moves. The loudest friction is rarely at the top of that list, because complaining is what people do while they’re still deciding to stay. The moments that end a relationship often generate almost no complaints at all, which is why they survive budget rounds year after year. We size each one against your own customer base, in money rather than in adjectives, and we say which one to start with and why that one. You’re free to disagree with the order, and you’ll be able to see exactly what it rests on.

Fewer than most people expect, and the honest answer is that it isn’t a number anyone should pick in advance, because it’s a point you reach and recognise. Sessions stop earning their cost when new participants trace routes you have already seen and the count of distinct problems stops moving, which on a well defined task tends to happen somewhere between the sixth and the tenth person, per market and per audience. Booking twenty in advance buys a longer report rather than a better decision, and booking five and stopping there is how a real problem gets missed. So we run the sessions in waves, watch for the point where the map stops changing, and tell you when it arrives. Sometimes that means recruiting more than we planned, and sometimes it means finishing early and saying so, which we’d rather do than fill the remaining slots.

Both, and the connection between them is what the firm is built on. We call it insight-led strategic intelligence because research earns its cost when it makes the strategy sound. In this category that means you get the evidence and what to do with it: which friction to fix first and what it is worth in renewals, what to leave alone because it is already doing the work, the decisions upstream that keep producing the same failure and the team that owns each of them, the promises to stop making until the service can keep them, and the places where the interface really is the problem rather than the symptom of one. The point is that your company loses less time and money going in the wrong direction.

Abdo López and Norah Walsh lead every project in person, from the framing session to the final reading, and everyone working alongside them is senior with more than a decade in the field. Around that core we build the team for the project. The right moderator for a usability session in Japanese is not the right one for a day in a depot with a delivery crew, and the specialist who reads a service operation from the inside is not the one who runs the quantitative sizing, so we select the experts, the partners and the technology that fit the question, the technique, the country and the industry. There’s no handover to a junior once the contract is signed, and that’s the main reason we stay small.