Customers Know You Suck: Actionable CX Strategies to Better Understand, Attract, and Retain Customers

by Debbie Levitt

Customers Know You Suck is the how-to manual for customer-centric product-market fit. Its highly actionable models, maps, and processes empower everyone to improve the Customer Experience (CX). Learn how to investigate, diagnose, and act on what's blocking teams. Gather the evidence and data that better inform decisions, leading to increased satisfaction, conversion, and loyalty. Use our governance model for implementing and monitoring the progress, success, and failure of internal process changes and experiments.

We’ve all been in that meeting: something we thought users would want or do didn’t happen as expected. How did we get that wrong and how do we keep that from happening again? Too often, product and service decisions are not guided by customer intelligence data. Where we lack knowledge, we work from guesses and assumptions, introducing or increasing risk.

Customers expect high quality and value from every interaction with your company. People notice when we don’t meet their quality standards. Our reviews, stock price, support tickets, and customer attrition clearly show that what we thought was “good enough” isn’t. If you lose potential or current customers in one channel, you’ve probably lost them in every channel.

But transforming toward customer-centricity strengthens customer relationships and increases revenue. Save money, reduce risk, work more efficiently, and improve culture while increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Genres: Design, Business, Research

334 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 28, 2022

About the author

Debbie Levitt, MBA, is the CXO of Delta CX. She’s a Customer Experience (CX) and User Experience (UX) strategist and change agent who specializes in setting houses in order in record time. She has nearly thirty years of experience but has been advised to mention only fifteen years on her résumé and LinkedIn.

Debbie is an experienced leader with a track record of building and leading diverse research and design teams, shaping product vision, influencing strategies, and driving initiatives. She has many years of experience in CX and UX strategy, research, information architecture, interaction design, prototyping, testing, and more.

Clients call her “Mary Poppins” because she flies in, improves everything she can, sings a few songs, and flies away to her next adventure.

Debbie is a career and life coach helping people with work and beyond. She loves being a catalyst, pushing boats out, and ensuring people know how to row them.

Debbie’s 2022 book, Customers Know You Suck, is the customer-centricity how-to manual. She’s proud of the book and knows it can help companies that care about improving quality, value, and business and customer outcomes. However, companies mostly want the business outcomes while skipping the quality, value, and customer satisfaction or delight that would get them there.

Debbie’s 2024 book, Life After Tech, is (possibly) the first book about leaving technology work. She addresses common career change emotions and fears through sensitivity, critical thinking, humor, and vulnerability. “What happened to tech jobs?” “What will I do next?” Life After Tech is your personal and proactive journey. Eighteen introspective exercises—plus templates and examples—make Life After Tech a guide and a workbook. Use the “Phoenix Flight Plan” to get grounded, plan, rise, and soar.

Outside of CX work, and sometimes during CX work, Debbie enjoys singing symphonic prog goth metal, opera, and New Wave.

Reviews

[Bianca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of great insights, but in a really provoking writing style. The main message is that customer-centricity is important and that most companies are doing it wrongly. The author also challenges a lot of „classics“ such as the lean startup concepts. At times, I found the message being pushed too harshly, but I guess this was the intention. Definitely a lot of food for thought - though conveyed in a quite polarizing manner.

[Michael Mathieu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought the general content of the book was great but a tad aggressive on “companies must build a massive CX org with a CXO” - reality doesn’t really allow this in today’s economic environment.

[Glory Creed · Rating 4 out of 5]

a commiseration on the industry of sorts, but practical

[Jose · Rating 4 out of 5]

A desperate cry for CX people to be listened to.
A catalog of 'things not to do' earned from fighting stakeholders acting against their best interests in companies.

You get the impression pretty much every company Debbie has worked with was run by morons. And she told them so, perhaps not so delicately.

A very worthwhile push for critical thinking.

She criticises Agile and other 'fashionable' methodologies.

Debbie is, like Nietsche, a destroyer of systems more than a proposer of alternative solutions to fill the void.

The ultimate message: companies in the lower end of the CX maturity scale (read: every company ever) are not customer-oriented. And they will resist that orientation with all their might, even if they hire you (or Debbie at least) to solve problems.

[Norbert Boros · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally, a unique tone about CX topic. Many books out there about customer experience are echo chambering; they repeat over and over again the same - sometimes fake message - about the whole CX job. Debbie Levitt's book is a bit different; what I loved is that they express fair criticism about the agile world, reflecting on my pain about the fake agile theatre. On the other hand, the design world saints also got some critics, like design thinking and design sprints, which are not equal to human-centered design. Overall an excellent book and I highly recommend especially for c-level managers.