Cuidado com a média

Há muitos anos que escrevo no blogue e falo nas empresas sobre a miudagem e os fantasmas estatísticos:

"At some point in your company’s growth, someone will utter the most pernicious phrase in business: “The average customer.”
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There is no such thing.
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Not only do average customers not exist, they also don’t matter. It is more valuable to identify the best customers (the ones who spend more and promote your business to other people) and the worst customers (so that you can convert them to promoters or fire them).
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How do you avoid the average trap?
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By continuing to have one-on-one conversations with your customers, even as their numbers grow. Keeping the voice of real customers alive in the business means keeping it in front of managers and executives just as much as front-line employees.
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Aggregated data distilled into averages won’t cut it. [Moi ici: Cuidado com o Big Data] Everyone in the company needs regular, recent customer feedback that includes verbatim comments about individual transactions. And when customers offer their precious time to provide those comments, managers and executives should call them back and close the loop."

Trechos retirados de "Why There Is No Such Thing as an ‘Average Customer’"