Martyn Christian, VP Worldwide Marketing for IBM Enterprise Content Management, talked about their success with implementing Net Promoter and customer loyalty program over the last 5 years.
Wow! These results tell the story:
- Increased Net Promoters from -6.73% to +20% (Net Shift of +26%)
- Acting on Key Drivers, Drove Over 30 Company Wide Improvement Initiatives
- Increased Revenue from Existing Base from 72% to over 80%
- Increased Net Profit 10 percentage points
- Increase “Positively Ecstatic” Customers
- Database with customers willing to serve as references increased from 100 customers to over 600 in 12 Months
- Published over 100 Customer Success Stories
- Increased Press Activity
- Analyst Validation – Gartner/IDC/Forrester briefings on program
So how did they get there?
They collected the feedback, but more importantly they acted, in the front lines, on the data.
One of the things they learned after the dot-com bust was that they had to invest into their existing customers – up-sell and cross sell. As Martyn stated, nobody will buy from you if they do not know or value you. Because of this, mining their existing customers was the core of their strategy over the last few years.
They had new products coming to market so central to their goals was to increase revenue, sales efficiency, increase customer and partner loyalty, and to build barriers to entry for competitors, all while selling the new products into the installed base.
FileNet started with a simple business problem that sounds familiar – they had, quoting Martyn, “No systematic process or program to generate advocates of our products and improve customer loyalty”. This resulted in a fragmented client relationship model; limited visibility into the customer’s enterprise; a fragmented customer-centric culture; and some departments that were engaged but most that were spectators. Employees, like the engineers, did not want to visit customers, especially unhappy ones.
One of the first things they did was to set goals, including Net Promoter targets for all employees worldwide. They also got executive sponsorship from the start. They built communication programs around this approach to drive compensation strategies and focus on response rates.
But the key was they acted! “Hot sites” was a Monday morning event where they reviewed customer issues. As Martyn stated, “Put the customer in the center of everything”. Relationship with the customer was a top company objective.
From a roadmap point of view, they started with a customer engagement initiative which resulted in a customer loyalty initiative, from Satmetrix, which was launched as one of the CEO's top 5 initiatives. From this program, they identified three areas to further investigate: a product lifecycle; leadership development; and development lifecycle initiatives.
They created a loyalty council, which was focused on direct customer action for all “trigger 6” surveys (detractors). They tied this into their CRM and set company targets around this. There was a case-by-case direct customer engagement in all functions – both front line and back office.
They also set some goals – like calling on existing customers at least 4 times a year – even if the customer had no budget! They also focused on segmenting customers as tune-up accounts or development accounts, which resulted in specific engagement strategies.
Another way they got value into the CRM system was to integrate the customer data so sales people could easily link into their customers’ experience data inside the CRM system.
Finally, every employee had a part of their variable compensation tied to NP or other customer engagement initiatives. They also had a sales contest where they could win a customer experience award, for which the sales teams were judged on a number of customer metrics, including the NP score, response rates and revenue. This prompted a fierce global competition between all the sales teams to win this award.
Here are some of the key takeaways that I got from Martyn’s presentation:
- Do not over-complicate!
- Create earlier and stronger transition/change management activities
- Share information across all disciplines
- Re-think functional roles and responsibilities
- Tie compensation to customer Loyalty
- Take a programmatic approach
- Consider this a component of your corporate fabric
- Prepare the company
All great advice!
