When companies monitor transactions occurring in large numbers and completed by individual customers, they are looking at past patterns. Enterprise Rent-A-Car is supposed to ask every driver returning one of its vehicles, “Would you rent from Enterprise again?” Any new service a France Telecom customer receives is followed by a brief questionnaire on the quality of his or her experience. As these two examples demonstrate, each attempt to determine the quality of the experience directly follows the experience itself. So companies receive by this method an uninterrupted, or “persistent,” flow of information, which they then analyze and communicate internally. Although surveys are the tool used most often for gathering data on past patterns, customers are sometimes approached through online forums and blogs. Companies are mostly guided by assertions that win customers’ strong agreement, but sometimes customers’ failure to react strongly to some feature or service can be just as telling. For this reason, the employees evaluating results must be attuned to areas of customer experience that a survey or other tool does not directly address.