TLF Gems Newsletter December 2025

Your monthly CX and insight newsletter from TLF Research

This may seem simple, but you need to give customers what they want, not what you think they want. And, if you do this, people will keep coming back.

John Ilhan

When we talk about Customer Experience we often reach for relatable examples to illustrate our points, and one that comes up again and again is Ryanair.

There's a tendency for people in CX to either dunk on Ryanair for their attitude to customers or adopt the (provocative?) position that they're actually great at CX because they create a clear proposition and stick to it.

It might surprise you that I actually tend more towards the second camp. The point about strategy is that it is yours; you get to decide which customers to target and what proposition to offer them. Ryanair's approach to the customer might not be one I'd choose, but it's perfectly sensible as a CX strategy on its own terms.

As we'll see in the first link, though, whatever your strategy there are times you need to think about the bigger picture.

Thanks for reading,

Stephen

Here are 6 things we think are worth your time this month

Paying To Be A Good Samaritan

This letter to the Guardian's consumer champions page was eyebrow-raising. As I said in my introduction, having a clear proposition is arguably more important than assuming the customer is always right, but there are times to waive your policy and this is clearly one of them. "I asked the airline to check it had understood. It blanked me. In Ryanair's world, it’s a passenger's responsibility to bypass anyone in need, or take the hit."

Read: Paying To Be A Good Samaritan

Using LLMs to Distort Online Surveys

Excellent article from Tom Stafford about the ease with which LLMs can be used to fool (and therefore deliberately distort) online surveys. The implications are pretty terrifying for all of us. "With social media already seriously unrepresentative, we don’t want to lose social research as a way to hold up a true mirror to the views of society. This new study makes clear just how much of a threat LLMs represent to the accuracy of survey research. The issue is of concern to all of us, not just survey researchers."

Read: Using LLMs to Distort Online Surveys

Easy To Do The Easy Things, Hard To Do The Hard Things

I really enjoyed this article by John Sills on LinkedIn, which nails so much that is wrong with CX these days. To offer a great experience you need to make sure not only that the typical experience is easy, but that anything outside of that can be easy too. "In trying to make everything ‘digital-first’, we’ve made it easy to do the easy things, and hard to do the hard things."

Read: Easy To Do The Easy Things, Hard To Do The Hard Things

Become An Octopus Organisation

I love this metaphor, and totally agree with the sentiment of this article about embracing the complexity of your organisation in order to unleash its collective potential. Is it time for you to become an Octopus? "In the Octopus model, a leader's primary job is to work on the system, not in it. They become system architects, obsessed with improving the environment than enables others to excel. Instead of directing every task, they default to trusting others to execute and focus on removing bureaucratic friction, clarifying purpose, cultivating psychological safety, and making sure the ownership for outcomes is clear."

Read: Become An Octopus Organisation

Every Company's Purpose Statement

(Content warning for slight sweariness on this one!) Amusing clip in which two Aussie comedians poke fun at the empty words of corporate purpose statements, all parroting not just the same sentiment but even the same words. "Our customers are at the heart of everything we do."

Watch: Every Company's Purpose Statement

What I'm Reading: Event Cognition

"Events" are the basic unit of customer experience, just as they're the basic unit of any human experience, and this book aims to give an overview of how they work from a psychology / neuroscience point of view. "Events are what happens to us, what we do, what we anticipate with pleasure or dread, and what we remember with fondness or regret. Much of our behavior is guided by our understanding of events. We perceive events when we observe the world unfolding around us, participate in events when we act on the world, simulate events that we hear or read about, use our knowledge of events to solve problems."

What I'm Reading: Event Cognition

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