The first presentation is by Dr. Vince Nowinski, the Principal Methodologist at Satmetrix (co-developer of Net Promoter). He is the guy who works to maintain sound methodological standards with Satmetrix and based on my observations, it appears he is succeeding. His presentation today is entitled "Measuring What Matters - Capturing the Voice of Your Most Important Customers." Vince's approach to the discussion is to cover the "who," "what," and "when," as it relates to sampling strategies, response rates and general survey design. This is a hotly debated subject and has brought much discussion thus far at the conference.

One of the underlying messages from Vince was that getting 'statistical representativeness' of your sample may not be the ultimate goal, especially when considering the differences between B2B versus B2C businesses models. The main takeaway I heard was that when in a B2B environment, particularly when focusing on an enterprise account structure, a census approach is preferred when as compared to a more traditional sampling methodology.  Vince was recommending that you identify your key decision makers and with assistance from your field sales organization, obtain survey responses from 100% of these folks if possible.

Vince then discussed the considerations around survey length, and raised the debate between survey design using "the one number..." versus the more traditional approach.  Data was shown around survey length and response rates, and I was very surprised that the difference in response rates between a very short survey and the longer survey was actually very small. Vince's point was that response rates were influenced more strongly by ensuring that the contacts were the most relevant in determining your relationship and the possibility of future business.

One last point that I took from Vince's presentation was how each of these 2 survey design philosophies could the impact the ability to determine key drivers. My key takeaway is that using the shorter survey, with perhaps the Recommend question and 1 open ended question, the ability to identify accurate drivers of loyalty becomes difficult. This is because the short survey provides you very few options for analysis.  The only tool you have available is to dive into the verbatim comments and determine qualitatively the key drivers. Using a more in-depth survey design will allow you to use statistical techniques to determine drivers, which to me seems like a more sound approach.

I will be interesting to see how this subject evolves over time as we begin seeing some long-standing practices being challenged.

As we enter the home stretch of Day One of the EMEA Net Promoter Conference, I cannot but be impressed with the amount of best practices that have already been shared by some very distinguished speakers. And this trend continues well into the afternoon as I have the pleasure of covering two speakers for you who will be laying out some key concepts that are the foundations for running a fine tuned Net Promoter program.

The speaker I am covering first is Simon Lyons, Global Head of Marketing and Communications for Aggreko, a generators rental business targeting companies, individuals and countries as well as providing mission critical power supply to disaster hit areas and regions impacted by war. They are a global company with a 1.5 billion market cap.

Simon talked about how things were when he joined 3 years ago. There was no collation of customer issues, no structured issue-handling mechanism and no real voice of the customer coming in to Aggreko. As Aggreko moved toward addressing these challenges, the inflection point came through a Harvard Business Review article that showcased similar business models to theirs where NPS was linked to revenue.

One of Simon's immediate actions was to move marketing closer to operational business. He rolled out the Net Promoter program using a phased approach, all the while addressing the challenges that had been the impetus for Net Promoter at Aggreko.

Three key points:

1. Get the support of your CEO
2. Keep the data simple
3. Make sure that the data can be used to produce useful insights

Simon made sure that the data collected through the Net Promoter surveys was made available to all Aggreko employees immediately. And I mean immediately! The responses go out to the groups who are required to take action and these groups or individuals are given forty-eight hours to connect with the surveyed. If they miss, their superiors are notified and are put on a similar forty-eight hour clock. Talk about intense commitment to follow-up!

Aggreko has seen a change in the way their customers have responded, and internally, they have found that the benefits of having NPS as a program brings the focus back on:

• Credible data for performance metrics
• Real time metrics that the company can act upon
• True operational transparency

All these elements combine to illustrate a facts-based picture that allows Aggreko to get closer to what truly matters to its customers.