Part 2: Top Ten Success Factors for Net Promoter Deployments

There were lots of compelling case studies presented at the recent Net Promoter conference in London. Clearly a revolution is occurring in the marketplace. If you don't embrace it, your competitors will bury you. Because sooner or later, they too will wake up to the power of this important customer-experience metric.

First off, just because Net Promoter is simple does not mean that it is easy. It requires discipline to make it happen. It requires methodology. It requires commitment. It requires technology. And it requires the whole company. I'd like to use this blog to summarize the top ten factors that spell success for Net Promoter practitioners:

1. Involve the CEO. At every customer presentation I attended in London, it came out that the CEO was actively involved in some way. Read the blogs from GE, Aggreko, Philips, Lego, and other attendees and you'll see precisely how CEO involvement was instrumental to launching their programs and keeping them on track.
2. Gather your proof points. Net Promoter programs are not always welcomed with open arms. The skeptics need proof. In many cases, pilot programs are put into place to get proof from within a targeted business segment, such as a region, product group, or business function. As the stories at the conference revealed, these pilot programs are key to demonstrable wins. The wins almost always involved front line personnel and stressed the importance of following up immediately on negative feedback. The most common approach was to focus on strategic accounts and the most common win involved saving a key account or culminating a large deal. This is the kind of proof point that gets attention.
3. Gain visibility. None of the programs highlighted at the London conference were kept in the back room. Many employees were involved, champions emerged or were assigned, internal and external marketing programs were employed to train and build understanding. This is one area where the strength of Net Promoter comes into play almost every time.
4. Find the right blend of top-down and bottom-up. There is no magic formula for how to collect Net Promoter data. It almost always consists of a blend of top-down data collection (periodic relationship surveys) as well as bottom-up transactional surveys driven by customer-facing business processes. The conference attendees used both short and long surveys. It sometimes took trial-and-error to get it right. When in doubt, they consulted with experts.
5. Win the hearts and minds of front-line workers. This may sound like a restatement of "gather your proof points," but there is more to say about this. Employees need to feel that they are important and have a stake in the customer experience - even when they do not always have direct customer involvement. This point came across very well when GE Real Estate talked about NPS Day. In one case, a clerical worker at GE, who is responsible for processing loan documents, actually got emotional during a moment of epiphany. "I never knew what I did mattered to the customer," he said.
6. Drive improvement in the scores. Remember, collecting NP data is just the first step. To affect change within your customer base, you must act on what customers tell you. This involves sharing customer feedback with front-line employees, and gradually changing the corresponding business processes when the aggregate data reveals a trend.
7. Commit for the long-term. We heard this again and again from the speakers at the conference. Success is derived from long-term commitment. For Net Promoter programs to work, you must think beyond quarterly results. This also helps smooth out the focus on short-term profits - ”or "bad profits," as Fred Reichheld calls them.
8. Encourage quick wins. There are generally quick wins to be had when talking with customers - both promoters and detractors. This is true even if the issues require long-term fixes. The act of listening and starting the improvement process is often enough to move detractors to higher scores even if you can't fix their issues right away.
9. Reinforce top corporate objectives. If customer experience and loyalty is not one of the top strategic corporate objectives, the Net Promoter program will fail. Strive to connect what you learn from customers with the things senior managers deem important, and vice versa. This requires a continual focus on CEO commitment and a marketing plan to increase program visibility.
10. Replay customer feedback for maximum impact. While numeric scores may come across as impersonal, customer comments have real impact. After product managers at HSBC were able to read what customers really wanted, they resolved an internal battle over which features to add to a key financial product. Listening to audio comments from recorded surveys is particularly enlightening.

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.

Richard Owen, CEO of Satmetrix, the co-developer of Net Promoter, kicked off the presentations by talking about Net Promoter and the value to your business. He talked about why Net Promoter is taking off.

Richard presented four reasons that are driving the adoption of NP:

• Shift to service economies
• Shortcomings in public accounting
• The high rate of CRM failure, and
• The Reinvention of marketing.

(And all in 45 minutes)

The first big topic that Richard covered is the shift to service economies.

When farmers started to celebrate birthdays for their kids, they used ingredients they had on the farm to make a cake. Eggs, milk, etc. Cost? About 5 cents. As people moved off the farms they went to the store and bought the same ingredients for about a dollar. But people wanted further convenience, so they bought cake mix (about 2 dollars). But more convenience was desired, so they go to the bakery and can pay up to 50 dollars for the same cake containing about 5 cents worth of ingredients – this is the definition of the full-service economy. But this is not the end – parents want a better experience for their kids, so they take their kids to entertainment places with pizza, games and the cake thrown in. Total cost? Over 200 dollars. The point is that advanced nations have moved from manufacturing to an experienced-based economy. Services are where the vast majority of value is being created. This leads to customer experience as a differentiator and why NP is important. The point is that value creation is becoming harder and harder. Operational efficiencies like inventory control are not a source of value creation any more. Long term value creation is now around the customer.

The next topic was the shortcomings in public accounting.

Accounting is not sexy. But accounting has profound impact on how a company does business. If customer metrics were as important as financial metrics then CEOs would be held accountable- but they are not. And compensation does drive behavior. In this case, short term profits vs. investing in long-term customer value creation.

This is why is NP compelling as it offers an open standard. It is compelling for marketing as well as financial organizations. With NP as an open standard you can optimize your business around financial performance and customer performance.

The next topic that Richard covered is the high rate of CRM failure.

Companies are spending billions on CRM, but companies do not know anything about their customers. This is because CRM is an inside-out view – what they have bought, when they bought it, etc. NP is a complement to CRM since it provides an outside-in view that is predictive and forward looking.

One of the failures of around CRM is adoption. NP can aid CRM adoption since it provides a valuable tool to your sales team. Just ask any account manager if knowing his Net Promoter scores of his decision makers and influencers for his next big deal would be valuable!

The last topic that Richard covered is the Reinvention of Marketing.

Advertising is in trouble – he gave the example of Digital Video Recorder ownership having increased to 20% of US households. Of these households, 70% skip commercials. Reaching your customers is getting harder and harder.

On the flip side, blogs have taken off. Your customers are talking about you. Wikipedia, RSS, podcasting, etc. are all growing. People want to be heard! What used to be frustrated letters to the CEO and phone calls to support are now being played out on YouTube. The suggestion box on the CEO’s door is now being done in public. These public sources are influencing opinion. Facebook has 90% of the student population in the US, MySpace has 57 million members, networking, open source technology. All of this is Word of Mouth marketing, positive and negative.

Bad PR from these online communities can negate million dollars of marketing spend. Marketing’s response is to spend more on marketing tricks, not on improving the customer experience. If you do not respond by focusing on customer experience you will lose in the end.

WOM is taking off and NP is one of the ways to get your arms around this phenomenon. The other point Richard got across is that Marketing does not know the efficiency of their spend. Interesting, since marketing efficiency is going down.

All of these things add up to why Net Promoter is taking off. The last reason he gave is that Net Promoter is an open standard. It is this openness that will drive its success at being adopted by a wider community.