Edward Craner, SVP of Strategy and Marketing at HOLT CAT, sat down with TDG founder Lynn Daniel to share what 13 years of structured customer feedback has meant for the largest Caterpillar dealer in the United States.

The Company

HOLT CAT is the Caterpillar machine and engine dealer for 118 counties in Texas. Founded in 1933, HOLT has grown from the smallest Cat dealer in the country to the largest, with approximately 3,000 employees and 50 locations. The fifth-generation Holt family still runs the company today.

The Challenge: Strong With Large Accounts, Blind to Everyone Else

When Edward joined HOLT in 2008, the company had an established relationship with its largest customers — the kind of accounts where sales teams knew customers by name, knew their families, knew their hunting dogs. That relationship-driven approach worked well at the top of the book.

But it didn’t scale.

“When you got into that long tail of customers that maybe we didn’t know so well, we had no way of gauging what that feedback was.” — Edward Craner, SVP of Strategy and Marketing

HOLT commissioned market research to understand their broader customer perception. The results were uncomfortable: customers described the company as expensive and hard to do business with. There were gaps between what quotes said and what invoices showed. Communication was breaking down in ways leadership didn’t know about.

The company’s NPS at the time sat in the low 70s — not bad, but not where a market leader wants to be, and not a number that told them where the problems actually were.

What They Did: Committed to Structured, Ongoing Customer Feedback

In 2007, HOLT CAT partnered with The Daniel Group to launch a systematic customer feedback program built around Net Promoter Score methodology. The goal wasn’t a one-time study — it was a continuous feedback loop that could reach customers across the entire spectrum, not just the ones with dedicated account managers.

The decision reflected a belief Edward brought from his background in telecom: in any dynamic business environment, getting customer feedback in a structured, ongoing way isn’t optional.

“Getting customer feedback on a regular basis became A1 in our book of things to do.” — Edward Craner

What the Feedback Revealed

The early results were humbling in a useful way. Customers who loved HOLT still cited real frustrations: costs didn’t match what they’d been told, communication broke down at handoffs, and follow-through was inconsistent.

The company’s products and people were strong. The how — the experience of actually doing business with HOLT — was where trust was eroding.

“Maybe we believe in our own press a little too much. We need to understand why it is that maybe we have some of these gaps in expectations from our customers.” — Edward Craner

Rather than defend the results, HOLT’s leadership adopted a different mindset: treat customer feedback as the breakfast of champions. If you can get it, understand it, and love it, it can help your operations.

What Changed

With a reliable feedback signal in place, HOLT made changes that went beyond survey scores.

Closing the loop became cultural. Every employee email signature included the question: Did we earn a 10 today? It turned every customer interaction into an invitation for feedback — not just from formal surveys, but from daily touchpoints with both external customers and internal stakeholders.

A dedicated CX role. HOLT created a Customer Experience Manager position to ensure feedback didn’t become one person’s bottleneck. Denise Leaders has held that role and driven the internal coordination that keeps feedback from getting siloed.

Employee recognition tied to CX performance. HOLT began recognizing employees specifically for high survey scores and unsolicited customer praise. When a customer called out a technician or parts person by name, that became an immediate recognition moment — reinforcing the behavior they wanted to see more of.

Expanded feedback channels. Over time, HOLT integrated social media signals alongside transactional surveys, bringing in feedback from Facebook, LinkedIn, and other channels. The challenge became synthesizing it all without data overload — keeping feedback actionable rather than overwhelming.

Employee feedback through TDG. HOLT also extended TDG’s methodology internally, using the same survey discipline to measure employee engagement and understand how internal culture connected to customer outcomes.

Thirteen Years Later

“Customer experience is truly the last differentiator. We can all sell products, we can all provide services, but it’s that customer experience that is the one thing unique to us.” — Edward Craner

HOLT CAT’s NPS has moved from the low 70s to the low 80s — and the number tells only part of the story. What’s changed more fundamentally is how the company thinks about customer feedback: not as a report card, but as an operational tool.

The partnership with The Daniel Group has sustained for more than 13 years because the feedback system keeps evolving alongside the business. What started as transactional surveys now includes multi-channel listening, employee engagement measurement, and a CX function embedded in the company’s operating culture.

Key Takeaways for B2B Industrial Leaders

  • Perception gaps are invisible without structured feedback. HOLT didn’t know they were seen as hard to do business with until they asked systematically.
  • Feedback only works if you act on it. Scores alone don’t change anything — HOLT built operational responses to what customers were telling them.
  • CX is a long game. The most meaningful changes came from 13 years of consistent listening and adjustment, not a single initiative.
  • Connecting CX to employee recognition accelerates culture change. When frontline employees see that customer feedback leads to recognition, not just criticism, engagement follows.

Want to see what a structured CX program could look like for your business? Book a free conversation with our team.