There is no denying that the workplace has changed dramatically over the past few years. International Youth Day is a good reminder that not only big events such as pandemics shape our work environments but also that younger generations are reshaping what people expect from work.
For many young professionals today, having a job is about more than just earning a salary. They want to work for organizations that feel authentic, offer flexibility, and provide opportunities to learn, develop, and grow. While pay and benefits remain important, they are no longer the only factors influencing employee satisfaction and loyalty.
Many younger employees also place a greater emphasis on wellbeing, diversity, sustainability, and having a sense of purpose in their work. Workplace culture matters more than ever, and people are paying close attention to how organizations treat their employees—not just what they say publicly.
As Millennials and Gen Z continue to make up a larger proportion of the workforce, organizations are being challenged to rethink traditional approaches to employee engagement. Expectations are evolving quickly, and assumptions about what employees want are no longer enough.
The question for employers is simple: Do we really understand what matters most to our people?
This is where listening becomes critical.
At Deep-Insight, we believe that understanding employee experience starts with measuring it. Our Employee Relationship Quality (ERQ) methodology helps organizations gain a clearer picture of the relationship between employees and employers by measuring key areas such as trust, engagement, communication, leadership, and overall workplace experience. We also thrive to understand things that are crucial in todays workplace such as work life balance.
These insights help organizations identify what younger employees value most and where improvements are needed. Whether it’s creating more flexibility, strengthening communication, supporting wellbeing, or providing clearer career development opportunities, understanding employee expectations is becoming increasingly important for attracting and retaining talent.
The best workplaces are not built on assumptions. They are built on listening, understanding, and acting on employee feedback.
This International Youth Day, organizations have an opportunity to reflect on an important question:
Are we creating a workplace where the next generation wants to stay, contribute, and build their careers?
The answer starts by listening.
Learn more about Deep-Insight’s Employee Relationship Quality (ERQ) methodology and how employee feedback can help create a stronger, more engaged workforce.
The past 24 months have been a turning point at Deep-Insight. Behind the scenes, we’ve completely rethought the way in which we deliver customer experience (CX) insights to our customers in the B2B space. As a result, we now have a (significantly) faster, more agile and more intelligent approach to enable you to understand your customers.
In 2024, we decided to re-establish the Product Management role within our organisation as a core strategic function. This was not just an internal shift, it was done as a direct response to a crystal clear message that we received from our clients:
Act faster to deliver even sharper insights.
Our customer’s feedback: the driving force behind our transformation
We’ve used your feedback as a driving force for all the changes we’ve made recently. Over the past 1-2 years we have worked closely with B2B leaders and conducted a series of in-depth interviews to really understand how they envision the customer experience landscape changing in the future. Our findings were consistent:
Businesses need real-time, actionable CX insights
Agility is no longer optional, but critical
Legacy tools are holding teams back
We took this feedback and advice seriously – and we acted on it.
What we’ve improved: CX platform innovations
As a result of everything we learned, we decided to first review the technical capabilities of the tools we were using. We wanted to relay the foundation on which we run our programmes and such we implemented the following:
A faster, more intuitive survey experience, providing respondents with:
A clean, modern interface
Simplified navigation between questions
Faster overall response time
The result? The same reliable customer feedback data but delivered with less friction.
The introduction of Deep-Dive Studio – our new CX analytics platform
This has to be the biggest leap forward that we’ve taken in years. This powerful analytical dashboard is specifically designed for understanding B2B customer experience insights. With this new platform, we have unlocked:
Real-time access to completion rates during the live survey period
Faster, flexible insight generation
Advanced analysis for in-depth understanding
AI-powered sentiment analysis
It helps us and our customers with actionable outputs for both account level changes as well as driving organisational strategy. In short, it transforms raw data into decision-ready intelligence.
Greater flexibility and customisation for complex B2B environments
No two B2B organisations are the same, and your CX tools shouldn’t be either. In the past, we used rigid tools, but that period has come to an end. Our new technology allows us to:
Adapt to bespoke client requests
Go beyond our standard frameworks
Respond quickly to the evolving market conditions
All in all, this means that you get a CX programme tailored to your business, not a one-size-fits-all model.
Why this matters for CX leaders
If you are responsible for CX in a B2B environment, you are likely feeling an ever-increasing pressure to:
Demonstrate return on investment (ROI) from CX
Deliver insights faster
Ensure feedback is aligned with strategic decisions
We have designed our transformation with this in mind and can help you from moving from data collection into driving real impactful change.
What’s next?
This is just the beginning. Our product team is committed to continuous improvement – testing, learning and evolving alongside our clients. You can expect further innovation as we continue on this journey to push the boundaries of what is possible at Deep-Insight when it comes to B2B customer experience management.
Get involved in our journey
If you’d like to:
See our new CX tools in action
Explore how CRQ and Deep-Dive Studio can support your business
Every year on Moon Day, we celebrate one of humanity’s arguably greatest achievements: landing on the moon.
But before the giant leap came years of observation, analysis, testing, and learning. Progress wasn’t driven by action alone—it was driven by understanding.
There is an important lesson here for businesses.
In today’s fast-moving environment, organizations often feel pressure to react quickly. New strategies, new products, new initiatives. Yet the most successful companies know when to pause, reflect, and listen before deciding their next move.
Customer feedback provides that moment of reflection.
Customer satisfaction scores can show where performance is changing, while customer comments reveal the experiences, expectations, and concerns behind the numbers. Together, they help organizations understand not just what is happening, but why.
At Deep-Insight, we see the most effective businesses using customer feedback as their mission control—guiding decisions, identifying opportunities, and helping leaders navigate uncertainty with confidence.
Just as every successful space mission depends on accurate data, every successful customer strategy depends on understanding the customer voice.
So, before taking your next giant leap, take a moment to pause, reflect, and listen.
Your customers may already be telling you where to go next.
At Deep-Insight, our CRQ methodology helps organizations turn customer feedback into clear direction and smarter decisions. Because every great journey starts with understanding. Get in touch with us to learn more.
The past 24 months have been a turning point at Deep-Insight. Behind the scenes, we’ve completely rethought the way in which we deliver customer experience (CX) insights to our customers in the B2B space. As a result, we now have a (significantly) faster, more agile and more intelligent approach to enable you to understand your customers.
In 2024, we decided to re-establish the Product Management role within our organisation as a core strategic function. This was not just an internal shift, it was done as a direct response to a crystal clear message that we received from our clients:
Act faster to deliver even sharper insights.
Our customer’s feedback: the driving force behind our transformation
We’ve used your feedback as a driving force for all the changes we’ve made recently. Over the past 1-2 years we have worked closely with B2B leaders and conducted a series of in-depth interviews to really understand how they envision the customer experience landscape changing in the future. Our findings were consistent:
Businesses need real-time, actionable CX insights
Agility is no longer optional, but critical
Legacy tools are holding teams back
We took this feedback and advice seriously – and we acted on it.
What we’ve improved: CX platform innovations
As a result of everything we learned, we decided to first review the technical capabilities of the tools we were using. We wanted to relay the foundation on which we run our programmes and such we implemented the following:
A faster, more intuitive survey experience, providing respondents with:
A clean, modern interface
Simplified navigation between questions
Faster overall response time
The result? The same reliable customer feedback data but delivered with less friction.
The introduction of Deep-Dive Studio – our new CX analytics platform
This has to be the biggest leap forward that we’ve taken in years. This powerful analytical dashboard is specifically designed for understanding B2B customer experience insights. With this new platform, we have unlocked:
Real-time access to completion rates during the live survey period
Faster, flexible insight generation
Advanced analysis for in-depth understanding
AI-powered sentiment analysis
It helps us and our customers with actionable outputs for both account level changes as well as driving organisational strategy. In short, it transforms raw data into decision-ready intelligence.
Greater flexibility and customisation for complex B2B environments
No two B2B organisations are the same, and your CX tools shouldn’t be either. In the past, we used rigid tools, but that period has come to an end. Our new technology allows us to:
Adapt to bespoke client requests
Go beyond our standard frameworks
Respond quickly to the evolving market conditions
All in all, this means that you get a CX programme tailored to your business, not a one-size-fits-all model.
Why this matters for CX leaders
If you are responsible for CX in a B2B environment, you are likely feeling an ever-increasing pressure to:
Demonstrate return on investment (ROI) from CX
Deliver insights faster
Ensure feedback is aligned with strategic decisions
We have designed our transformation with this in mind and can help you from moving from data collection into driving real impactful change.
What’s next?
This is just the beginning. Our product team is committed to continuous improvement – testing, learning and evolving alongside our clients. You can expect further innovation as we continue on this journey to push the boundaries of what is possible at Deep-Insight when it comes to B2B customer experience management.
Get involved in our journey
If you’d like to:
See our new CX tools in action
Explore how CRQ and Deep-Dive Studio can support your business
This is a story about rats, cobras and economists (and no, they’re not the same thing!) but it’s primarily a blog about a British economist called Charles Goodhart and his take on target setting, key performance indicators (KPIs) and the law of unintended consequences.
Goodhart is a man whose musings are worth reading if you’re struggling to make your customer experience (CX) programme work. All CX programmes involve the measurement of customer satisfaction (CSat), Net Promoter Score (NPS) or similar KPI. Companies will sometimes incentivise their employees to achieve a particular CX objective: “If we hit our NPS target of +50 this year, all sales staff get an additional bonus of £1,000.” This is not an uncommon practice. It’s also not a good one, as we are going to find out shortly.
Charles Goodhart is best known for Goodhart’s Law, which is neatly summarised in the Sketchplanations cartoon above. Setting targets can result in unintended consequences, particularly where incentives are involved.
Before we delve into Goodhart and his famous law, let’s start with a couple of stories about rats and cobras.
The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt
In 1902, the French ruled Indochina, a region in South East Asia comprised of modern-day Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The capital and administrative centre was Hanoi.
That year, the French administrators introduced a bounty on rats after it was discovered that rats played a significant role in transmitting the plague. The Third Plague Pandemic was a pretty serious issue in Asia at the time. It had spread from China in the late nineteenth century and by the time it was finally eradicated in the 1960s, more than 10 million people had died from the plague.
A bounty seemed to make sense. To claim it, the locals simply had to bring in a bag of rat tails. There was no need for piles of dead rats clogging up the corridors of power in Hanoi – tails would suffice. Within weeks, the bounty was working. Hundreds of rat tails poured in. Then thousands. It seemed too good to be true, and so it turned out to be.
It didn’t take long for French officials to figure out what was happening. The bounty had created an entirely new industry in Hanoi where rodent tails were brought into the capital from the countryside. Worse still, entrepreneurs in Hanoi started to breed rats in order to increase their bounty revenues. The number of rats in Hanoi was increasing, rather than decreasing.
Eventually, the bounty was discontinued. This story of administrative failure and unintended consequences is told in Michael Vann’s book The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt.
The Cobra Effect
It’s not just the French who were outwitted by their colonial subjects. A similar case happened under British rule in India, and documented in Horst Siebert’s book Der Kobra-Effekt.
At the same time that the French were grappling with a rat epidemic in Hanoi, the British were dealing with a cobra explosion in India. Cobras were viewed by the British administrators as deadly pests and a bounty was introduced in Delhi for every dead cobra handed in to the authorities. Many cobras were killed and handed in but, to the bemusement of the British rulers, the cobra population seemed to be on the rise.
It’s the same story of simple economics: the cost of breeding a cobra was significantly lower than the bounty, so entrepreneurs started to breed cobras. When the bounty was stopped, the breeders released the remaining cobras into the wild, further exacerbating the situation.
Goodhart's Law
Charles Goodhart is a British economist. He was born in 1936 and spent nearly 20 years of his career at the Bank of England, working on and writing about public and financial policy. In 1975, he wrote a paper containing the line: “whenever a government seeks to rely on a previously observed statistical regularity for control purposes, that regularity will collapse.”
The comment was specifically about monetary policy but would later be generalised as a law about targets, metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). In 1997, the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern expressed Goodhart’s Law as follows when she was investigating grade inflation in university examinations:
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The more a 2.1 examination performance becomes an expectation, the poorer it becomes as a discriminator of individual performances. Targets that seem measurable become enticing tools for improvement.
Marilyn Strathern’s interpretation is the one that has become the most widely used today.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
The basic message from Goodhart’s Law is a simple one: beware the law of unintended consequences when you set targets for people to achieve.
This is equally true when companies set targets in the field of customer experience (CX). If senior leadership teams incentivise their sales people and account managers to hit Net Promoter Score (NPS) targets, they will be achieved come hell or high water. In a previous blog, I outlined how CX programmes are often ‘gamed’ to achieve ridiculously high NPS targets which bear no relationship to the company’s actual performance. Common actions taken to game the CX system include:
Selecting only those clients who are Ambassadors for you and your product or service, when you are looking for customer feedback
Within those clients, selecting only those individuals who you know will score you 9/10 or 10/10 (these are ‘Promoters’ in NPS terminology)
Making sure to deselect any client that is likely to give you a poor score, using excuses like: “Now is not the right time to ask their views” or “We’ll only antagonise them if we approach them now”
Refusing to send a survey to anybody who doesn’t know you really well, even if it’s a senior decision maker that you’d love to have a conversation with. Why? The chances of them scoring you 9 or 10 are slim
Not outsourcing the NPS survey process to a third party that can give the option of confidentiality to survey participants – confidential surveys are likely to elicit lower scoreseven if they provide a much more realistic and honest view of your product or service
In many cases, employees and leadership teams are unaware that they are gaming the system. They simply believe that they are doing the right thing for the company.
Avoiding the CX Rat Trap - 5 Rules
Rule No. 1: Do not incentivise employees to achieve CX targets. It’s that simple. If you do, you’ll end up with more rats and cobras than you can handle.
Rule No. 2: If your Senior Leadership Team or Board is bonused on achieving NPS results, stop this practice immediately! You would be amazed at the number of companies that engage in such bonus schemes.
Rule No. 3: Resist the temptation to publish your Net Promoter Score in your annual report. All you are doing is setting yourself up for inflated NPS results as nobody in the organisation will want to be associated with a ‘down year’. It’s human nature. By accident or design, employees and leaders will game the system to achieve higher scores next year.
Rule No. 4: Put a robust CX governance structure in place. Make sure ALL clients are surveyed. Sign off the contact lists. Resist the urge to exclude people whose views might be unfavourable – you want to know what they are thinking.
Rule No. 5: Finally, don’t approach CX with the mindset of a colonial administrator! Senior leadership teams have to view customer feedback as a gift. They have to encourage their colleagues to be open about getting feedback, whether good, bad or indifferent. Without honest feedback, change will never happen. Poor practices will continue and eventually clients will leave.
Finally, if you want to find out more about how to set up and run a customer experience (CX) programme effectively, contact us for a chat. We’d love to hear from you.
