Question: Why does the insurance industry use so many acronyms?

Peter Harmer, CEO at Aon UK suggests: "Could it be that insurance professionals are inarticulate, lazy or have bad memories?"

As designed, Peter's self-posed question and response ellicited a nice ripple of laughter from the audience but if Peter is indicative of other insurance professionals then I wouldn't believe a word of it. Serious, yes, but with a dry sense of humour. Confident, yes, but with a healthy streak of humility. Focused on the customer? Absolutely!

Working in an industry like insurance which is largely seen, and I quote, "as a bastion of conservatism and tradition"; introducing an innovative concept like Net Promoter must take quite a bit of gumption. And although Aon's program is still in its early stages, it appears that Peter's team are off to a successful start.

Aon is one of the largest insurance (re-insurance) companies in the world with over 36,000 staff in 120 countries generating $8 billion in annual revenue. They, like other players in the industry, have seen the movement of focus from tangible to intangible assets such as brand, reputation and supply chain dynamics. Aon have embraced the changing environment and in 2007, they took the opportunity to review their position in the marketplace through a series of dialogues with their customers. They weren't asking "what do you think of Aon and how should we change?" but the more salient question of "what is happening for you?". By understanding their customers' positioning, focus, future goals etc, Aon could then look at how they could best respond to their customers' needs.

Their articulated focus is totally customer-centric: "It helps our clients - or it helps our people to help our clients."

So how has the introduction of NPS impacted their business? Fundamentally it has become the bedrock of their customer interaction and understanding. It underpins their other key customer interactions: customer advisory groups, customer interviews and debriefings and client service reviews.

And why did they choose NPS? Acronym aside, they chose the metric and the underlying discipline because it was simple and robust, and had global presence and recognition.

Their review process and introduction of Net Promoter led them first to re-segment their customer base, focusing on revenue and customer type, rather than the more traditional approach of product. Reviewing the Net Promoter Scores by segment gave them new learnings around the way in which they managed certain customer bands. They also reviewed scores by respondent role and by region and again applied learnings from the analysis to communications and management programs both regionally and by job role.

Aon certainly focus on taking action on detractors to mitigate the risk of attrition, but what impressed me most was the way in which they work with their promoters. Understanding the promoters within the Aon revenue engine is key. Strategically, they are able to use promoter data to help define strategies around upselling, cross-selling and developing direct referrals. Tactically, promoters have become important in helping at marketing events such as customer recruitment drives. Let's just say that the power of promoters in helping to "sell" to prospects cannot be underestimated! Fundamentally, promoters are assisting in a number of ways to drive that revenue engine.

Key in all of this is the ongoing focus on the customer. This has led Aon to a healthy NPS of +25% and they continue to learn and refine the program. Now that Peter is making insurance more interesting I, for one, am looking forward to the next chapter!

Click here to download the presentation.

Having completed the first day of the conference, it certainly feels that the subject of communities is a growing concept for developing deeper relationships with customers; and a customer community perspective is a perfect partner to a more established loyalty program. Communities and the relationship with NPS were also the focus of the start to Day 2, articulated by a great speaker and veteran of the community concept, Kip Knight from eBay.

Now, you would be forgiven for thinking that eBay see their community solely in terms of their online existence but it was great to hear from Kip that their concept of community goes much deeper and wider. Before looking at this further, let's just refresh on the background of the company.

• Started in 1995, after a year of operations there were 41,000 users on eBay. Today there are over 248 million people active on eBay.
• The vision of the company is to make it possible for practically anyone to sell practically anything in a worldwide marketplace.
• At any one time, there will be 103 million items for sale on the site.
• Over 1.3 million people make a large part or all of their living trading on eBay.

The eBay community itself is defined in terms of including everyone who has a relationship with the company. That really does include everyone --  from buyers and sellers to partners, vendors and associate organisations. This is known as eBay's eco-system and through the online platform and wider community, eBay have developed their strategic differentiation through a unique asset and developed a real tool to promote and develop loyalty and retention.

Perhaps the key driver of the success enjoyed by eBay is the early focus that was placed on a set of values underpinning the business. Those values were outlined as:

• People are basically good.
• Recognise and respect each person as unique individuals.
• Everyone has something to contribute.
• Treat others as you would want to be treated.
• An honest, open environment will bring out the best in people.

As well as developing the online feedback tool, offline eBay has continued to develop the honest, open environment through live discussion events, "Bay In Person" visits, open dialogue and the member advisory group, Voices, who assist with ongoing developments. What eBay has found is that the more a member of the community is involved, the stronger their promoter status. And that involvement should not be limited to the online interaction.

So how does NPS fit into all of this? Well, first of all Fred Reichheld's Golden Rule is articulated as one of the core values. Secondly, eBay felt that the discipline would be core to developing best practice improvements, increasing competitive awareness, focusing on incremental investments and really enabling a deep-dive understanding of their members loyalty behaviour. The NPS discipline also appealed because it was based on a simple concept metric, it was easy to articulate and it provided a forward looking metric for the business.

Interestingly enough, as with some of my customers, it was not specifically the "Recommend" question that eBay used. After researching and analysing the data, it was found that "Intend to Buy" was a better-correlating metric for their business. They are now moving to "Recommend" as it certainly is relevant to their business and it does allow for more benchmarking comparisons across a wider range of organisations as so many comapnies are using it as a key metric today.

eBay have melded their community and NPS program into a coherent approach to loyalty. It didn't happen overnight and Kip and the team spent time in defining and planning the program (you only get the one opportunity to implement this!), building the foundation and they are now moving into further evaluation and expansion.

Kip's key learnings from the implementation are:

• Know when to centralise and when to delegate
• Never stop learning
• Process is king
• One size does not fit all

And yes, it's not simple in any organisation to implement a loyalty program -- it comes with its own set of unique challenges; but as Kip ably demonstrated -- it's worth it!

Click here to download the presentation.

One of the strengths of Net Promoter is its simplicity. It's incredibly easy to ask the ultimate question and to use the answers as a helpful business benchmark. But this simplicity is also its weakness if organisations don't use it as originally designed by Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix; to be an enabler for business improvement. A lot of people I spoke to yesterday are using NPS to identify detractors and to remove the sources of detraction. This makes a lot of sense because research shows that detractors can be more influential than promoters. Indeed work at the London School of Economics shows that one negative recommendation takes up to four positive ones to counter it

This approach has been endorsed by the brilliant case study from Virgin Media - find out what you do badly and improve it. As a former NTL (acquired by Virgin Media) customer I can definitely see the fruits of this exercise! However, very few people I spoke to are activating their promoters. LEGO showed the powerful returns that this can deliver. You see there is a marked difference between the scoring a 9 or 10 and actually recommending - and perhaps more importantly, recommending on a regular and systematic basis.

The secret to converting a promoter into an advocate is to Listen using NPS, Involve by treating them as advisers (through more systematic research) and Empower by actually allowing them to shape your future direction - just as Lego has done with its power users. And don't be put off from doing so just because you don't work for an iconic brand like Lego. Promoters already love you - because you exceeded their expectations. Turn that love into an active daily passion by making them part of your business.