Delegates are returning from a short coffee break – room is packed again.

Peggy Conley introduces her session by explaining LEGO adopted NPS two years ago as part of a turnaround strategy for company.

NPS has permeated LEGO company culture - focusing the business on customer experience (the key driver of NPS).  Example of CEO receiving letter from customer asking for Space LEGO instructions - and replying personally.

Peggy is talking about critical success factors for NPS deployment:

1) Employees know the score

2) Employees are rewarded for improvements to score (10% of bonus on NPS improvement )

3) Employees feel they can personally have an impact on NPS

First step in building a Net Promoter Program for LEGO involved tracking NPS in surveys (which LEGO had been doing for several years - so they already had basic) benchmark data.

Measuring NPS is involves researching right consumers (core target groups), at the right time (after brand interactions), and right experiences (experiences over which business has some control)

LEGO measure user NPS as a customer experience metric across 5 key areas:

Product Experience (immediate post purchase), Online Experience, Store Experience, Customer Services experience.

The LEGO NPS surveys are kept deliberately short - four questions - to get impressive response levels.

Peggy is explaining how all monthly NPS data and actions are summarized on a single sheet that is distributed to the business departments.

NPS data is also used to feed into an affinity segmentation model to allow LEGO to build segment specific initiatives for improving NPS/experience.

Different methodology for different experiences - but goal of NPS research is to measure quality of experience and opportunities for improving it.  Key is to turn data/info into actionable insights

Peggy is wrapping up by giving examples of how NPS research is driving business improvement initiatives.

1. how mood of customer services influences experience (NPS) - when engaging an fun experience quality (NPS) increases
2. how ease of finding instructions on the website influences experience - a site redesign increases NPS significantly
3. how search and navigation on online store influences experience - usability tests and “deep dives into open comments” identified how to improve experience
4. how packaging quality influences experience - improved packaging improved NPS
5. how delivery times for online sales influences experience - improving delivery times improved NPS

Beatrice Dupuis, Directeur process et satisfaction abonnés with Groupe Neuf Cegetel, is introducing her talk - implementing a Net Promoter strategy in consumer call centers for Neuf Cegetel, a broadband supplier. Neuf Cegetel has a clear strategic vision to get closer to customers, address their needs and become the top rated supplier in terms of customer service - and is using NPS to do this. Neuf Cegetel outsource call centers and use Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a quality/satisfaction index to counterbalance productivity metrics they use as KPIs for call centers.

Beatrice is explaining how the purchase of AOL France has helped them understand key NPS drivers because of its position as

• Top in customer service
• Lowest in churn levels
• Highest recommendation level

Key NPS drivers for call centers

• Accessibility
• First call resolution
• Agent politeness
• Added Value (surprise factor)

Neuf are learning from AOL actions to improve performance on these critical success factors

• Accessibility - number of agents, scheduling resource availability, anti-absenteeism initiative, and for consumers development of self-care online tools
• First call resolution - training agents to understand and solve problems quickly
• Agent politeness - training agents communication skills - but no scripts
• Added value (surprise factor) - giving information on new products, new intranet portal for agents to keep up to date on latest offers

The success of these initiatives is allowing Neuf Cegetel to build a business case for rolling a Net Promoter strategy across the business.

Beatrice is saying that Neuf are early on the NPS journey but are already learning lessons including:

• Critical importance of marketing the strategy internally and with call center partners
• Key to communicate results internally and with call center partners
• Necessity of identifying the weight of call center Net Promoter in overall satisfaction

A great story involving two implementations of Net Promoter.

We began the Process Excellence track with a presentation from HSBC's Nadya Hijazi.

A Little Context

Because HSBC is such a large, global company it's difficult to present themselves cohesively to their customers. Perceptions of their customers differ widely based on where they are located and which part of HSBC they work with.

And, HSBC have a very competitive environment in which they must make a multi-million dollar investment in HSBCnet, introducing new functionality, and supporting geographic expansion. 

What They Did
HSBC needed a compelling metric at high level that would provide actionable data - one question and diagnostics was used to hit the ground running. A key point was that Nadya worked with the business teams to define the diagnostic questions - but she would only allow their questions to be included if they were ready to action the answer. That's a great way to ensure action takes place!

HSBC surveyed 27,000 customers across 24 countries with a complete survey of the end-to-end customer experience. The last two questions were NPS and why? HSBC also made sure that they included the end users in the survey, not just the decision makers.

Nadya presented three findings around detractors:

• 14% of end users who were detractors made 6 or more calls into call center vs. 7% of promoters.  That adds up to serious costs. This higher cost-to-serve goes across all aspects of HSBC brand - whether experience is personal or professional.
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• Quality was critical for the customer, and a major factor for customer dormancy and attrition.
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• Satisfaction survey - good measure, but NPS more powerful. Only "delighted" were likely to be promoters. "Satisfied" were more likely to be detractors. This surprising finding upset some people who thought they were doing a good job with a 70% satisfaction rating, but their NPS didn't tie up.

She concludes NPS is a measurement of the quality of the relationship versus satisfaction with specific event.

Put It in Context

Nadya related two key things to understand to correctly put your Net Promoter score in context: cultural differences and competition. HSBC found that their top scoring countries were the same as in the Satmetrix white paper. Furthermore, 75% of HSBC customers are multi-banked. They asked their customers to rate and rank their competitors in country which gave evidence of their relative position in market segment in that country. Key learning: do not compare country to country without knowing the cultural bias and competitive climate. It is more important to benchmark in country, and incentivize on local transactional NPS.

How to Move That Score? Innovate by Involving Your Customers!

Nadya implemented a technique called "tryvertising" - beta test online changes on their internet banking platform. They identified main issues, and asked users to road test and give feedback. It was quite revolutionary, as they used detractors and passives as the focus group for the issue. They were able to increase NPS 20%.

Second, involve lots of customers. Don't just use 5-10 people in focus group, involve everyone - she ran webinars with her channel across 3 regions. HSBC got excellent feedback, and had a big impact on their customers' perception of them, which proved to be good for morale for product team and customer!  And it cuts out a lot of discussion about what to do, as the improvement design comes straight from customer's mouth.

How Do You Improve the Impact of the Multi-Million Dollar Investment?

NPS alone is not the remedy to everything.  Understand how to make changes that strike a balance. Prioritize your customer issues and invest in what cuts across many of your customers, or what costs you your most valuable customers. But, remember, much of what you do is baseline or expected - it will minimize detractors, but will not create promoters.

An interesting technique on increasing response rates is to phrase questions around how the customer expresses something directly - this struck a chord for HSBC customers and doubled their response rates.

Nadya gave us lots to think about.