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:
- Get the support of your CEO
- Keep the data simple
- 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.
