European Conference Blog 2008

The Insider's View: What your Employees Have to Say about Recommending You

info@netpromoter.com — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:03:05 GMT

Holcim may not be a well known company on first pass, but after hearing the facts, you will wonder why you never heard of them. A couple of interesting things: They've grown in the last 4 years from having 44,000 to over 100,000 employees. Their strong growth, just like Symantec's, was fueled through acquisitions plus organic growth.

Holcim's rapid growth pushed the organization to get more systematic processes and metrics in place. As an Engineering company, Christian Birck, Head of Branding for the company, said "everything was a measurement" and that management was used to numbers. However, they had no metrics on people or customers.

The company had another challenge in that they had a mixed model. In some markets they were B2B; they sold to construction companies. In others they were B2C and sometimes B2B2C. Christian showed a great slide that said this industry was "not the sexiest, but real." As such, one of their challenges was in recruitment. As well, they knew they needed to keep the good talent they had, but focus on getting more.

So, according to Christian some of the key business challenges were:

Organic growth and threat of commoditization
Getting right talent and enough of them
Building and protecting their reputation  this is particularly important in their business

Because Holcim does not enter different new markets lightly, they are extremely focused on the long term. They believe one of their key differentiators is their people  how their employees fit and exemplify the values of the company. The list of things they wanted to accomplish included:

Making their people ambassadors for the company
Focusing all employees on delivering on company promises
Fostering a culture of customer orientation
Facilitating knowledge-sharing
Facilitating integration of new acquisitions

I thought Christian did an excellent job of explaining that "Brand does not equal logo, or advertising." He believes that the brand promise has to be communicated in products, communications, behavior, and channel experience. This means you really have to deliver to this.

In addition, through their complex business, it wasn't just their employees who had to live their brand promise, but their partners as well. This was a challenging aspect for them, to make sure channel partners also were also ambassadors of the brand.

One of the programs that the company put in place was something they called "Living our Values." This included: vision, mission, and values with some support systems. For their industry, Holcim felt that trust was low, so the ability to differentiate on values was critical. Christian wisely pointed out that anyone can put values in words, but it was how you get the organization to understand and live the values that was the challenge.

Holcim put in some change management processes to reinforce their message. One of their principles was: Enough of us for long enough. This message went back to the earlier point about retention and recruitment. Another key differentiator in terms of Holcim's messaging around this was "it is not just another program". For them, the word "program" meant it was fleeting, not permanent, and they wanted everyone to take this seriously. They focused on leadership as well, having them engage, communicate, and reinforce aligned behaviors.

One of the other enlightening statements from Christian was that you "Don't have to have a big brand for employees to believe in you." In my experience, this is very true. It is the extent to which you live the values as a company, and the extent to which these values also align with employees' own personal values.

From a measurement perspective, Holcim collected two types of NPS: (1) measuring recommendation of products and services, and (2) measuring whether employees recommend Holcim as an employer. What they found was that the recommend score for products and services was very high, but scores for recommending Holcim as an employer varied dramatically.

So, this measurement of employee promoters told Holcim the extent to which they were making progress. For their large complex business, they realized that some actions took a long period of time, and that too frequent reporting of the metric could be counter productive, in that management had to see progress.

They also found that it was difficult to sometimes prioritize empowerment drivers, as well as what things the company could actually influence.

Finally, one of the other things they realized in trying to develop trackable metrics was that there seemed to be a strong cultural bias in answering questions. There were dramatic country-level differences. This did not surprise me however, as we have seen this as well at Satmetrix. Christian wisely pointed out that they don't compare scores between countries, nor did they consider normalization as this would be hard to communicate and take away the very thing they like: the simplicity of the measurement.

What did I learn from Christian's presentation? Holcim's story is similar to Symantec's -- large complex organizations take time to change, but both have implemented many successful mechanisms and practices to try to help them get there. Holcim is also somewhat similar to Travel Counsellors in that they recognized that the individual employee was critical to representing their brand. The added twist with Holcim was trying to also reinforce their "promise" through their partner channel. Perhaps at next year's Net Promoter Conference we will see more about this last dimension; one that I'm sure many companies are trying to get right as well.

Click here to download the presentation.

Transforming Employee Behavior: An Integrated View of Loyalty

info@netpromoter.com — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:33:43 GMT

Alexsandra Alfonso, Senior Global Manager of Customer Experience Programs at Symantec, began her session by discussing the past 3 years of tracking Net Promoter at Symantec. What was particularly interesting was the significant amount of change and transition that has happened in Symantec as a result of merger acquisitions, the largest of which was Veritas. Alex compared and contrasted the before and after view of what this meant by revenue, acquisitions, employee portfolio, customer locations, and values. Throughout these major transitions, Symantec was able to keep their core company values -- innovation, action, trust, and a customer driven philosophy -- intact.

Alex articulated Symantec's mission, which was to enable and empower individuals to create change in the business, to improve customer experience. I like this mission as it really brings together two key components in one mission statement, the employee and the customer.

Alex outlined the history of NPS at Symantec. She indicated that the primary concern early in 2005 was to establish a sound baseline, and from there, to look at key drivers and what impact these were having on the customer.

There were several program elements that Symantec focused on initially. One of these was a customer loyalty champion program. Employees from various business units who were passionate about customers were selected to participate. Their role evolved over time, but initially they focused on aligning products and process (not surprising given the amount of change through the merger process). Also, they focused on creating quarterly executive summaries of the results (these also transformed over time). Finally, they realized that all employees needed to be aware of the individual role they played in customer loyalty. Throughout this time, Alex mentioned that Symantec was more focused on operational issues and less focused on loyalty (meaning there were many competing priorities). They tended to operate from an internal point of view and perhaps lower executive involvement than they would have liked.

Today this has changed; Symantec has launched efforts around the "power of one, the power of the individual."

One of their biggest learnings from their early program was the importance of making individual business units accountable for the results. Alex showed how their process has changed in terms of key improvement steps, which include insight, inform, action, and measure model. This happens in all areas of their complex key stakeholder relationships -- B2B, employee, B2C, and partner.

Symantec also realized that the customer loyalty champion was critical to making NPS success real. The role has changed, though -- they are putting more structure, framework, and definition around the role, for ultimate success. They've also reframed the executive summary process -- these now take place at the highest level and issues are really owned by the business.

Finally, employee awareness education has gone though huge change, by communicating through multiple mechanisms, including webcasts and online training, giving employees the power to make change and take action locally. These awareness enhancements have enabled employees to participate in generating creative ideas to improve how Symantec operates.

Alex noted that now Symantec is focused more on business change and less on operational actions. They rely on root cause analysis to really understand business change.

Their latest stage of improvement is now focused on named account surveys. This requires a very mature sales organization that has really bought in to the program. Symantec is using this feedback as part of an integrated account review process. Although there were some associated changes that had to be made, she said the benefits were huge.

Symantec has also implemented the Customer First Award. Employees are nominated quarterly, which helps drive attention around customer loyalty. I believe it is these grass root efforts that really motivate employees to focus on the customer.

NPS is now included as part of the executive compensation package at Symantec. Alex said that this action really helped solidify the belief that this was "serious." It made executives think that perhaps their staff was out of alignment with their goals, potentially pushing ownership of NPS downwards in the organization.

I thought one thing that was interesting was the clarity the company Chairman has on communicating what's important. There are 3 metrics -- NPS, market share, and ENPS (Employee Net Promoter Score). The Chairman and COO recently delivered this message to all 5000 sales and marketing employees.

Some critical learnings from Alex:

It is vital that employees understand the impact they have on the customer. To do so, you must connect individual behavior to the impact on the customer.
The program must be owned by and driven from the top.
Make it actionable and make it positive; both of which are critical to NPS
Accountability and Reward; Compensation, if used appropriately, can help steer people in the right direction.
Communicate -- This is perhaps the most critical. Communication cannot just be internal, customers need to understand this as well.

I thought this was a great presentation that connected the dots between customer and employee behavior. As well, it was an honest look at a very complex organization that has gone through dramatic changes and has managed to keep the focus. I'm looking forward to seeing Symantec's future progression on this journey.

Click here to download the presentation.

The NPS Conference Re-Charged My Batteries - Alan Woollam

info@netpromoter.com — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:06:01 GMT

There are times during the year when convincing folk to take their first loyalty steps can seem almost as tough as trying to solve world hunger. So I was delighted to see so many companies eating well at the Net Promoter Conference in London. I was particularly encouraged to see more focus on leveraging promotors this year. Some companies get so embroiled in identifying and acting upon the root causes of detraction that they forget about leveraging their promotors. Aon highlighted major wins from referrals, saying, we are never too shy to ask for referrals. Creating communities is also a growing tactic to tap into a wealth of information promotors are only too willing to share, and they feel more valued as a result.

B2B Relationship Management - There were plenty of lively contributions during the roundtable sessions.

Several key themes emerged that can make or break a B2B loyalty programme in its first year.

Selecting the right clients -- Start small, do not rely on CRM databases for contacts and qualify through the account teams. Ask the principle customer contact to nominate additional key stakeholders within their company. Just asking accounts for a contact list can in itself uncover shortcomings. Account managers on top of their game can turn a request around within the week. The ones who procrastinate may not have the right relationships in place.
Stand in your customers shoes -- Getting the account teams to take the survey first (as the client), can yield very different ratings and a reality check!
Incentivise -- Reward account teams for participation and closing the loop with customers.
Can you deploy to clients where you have no relationship? Absolutely -- Deploying a Net Promotor programme into either a new account or an existing account with a new account manager is a great opportunity to assess the relationship opportunity and enter into new dialogue to feed the account planning process.

I'm back at the same venue this week participating at the Net Promoter Certification Course, and London weather is being kind to us this week, thankfully.

Click here to download the presentation.

Investing in Community and NPS to Drive Customer Loyalty

info@netpromoter.com — Sun, 04 May 2008 07:29:17 GMT

Kip Knight, Vice President of Marketing at eBay, spoke about Investing in Community and NPS to Drive Customer Loyalty. 248 million people are registered on eBay creating a worldwide online marketplace.

Over 1.3 million people make all or part of their living on eBay. eBay defines community as everyone who has a relationship with eBay including buyers, sellers, employees, and users of Skype to select a few examples. eBay sees community as a strategic differentiator. Members actively engaged with eBay have a higher NPS, sell more, buy more and in general are more valuable customers.

The eBay community as defined has both online and off-line components. eBay Live events are a significant part of the eBay community initiative. Online, eBay has a number of channels including The Chatter which is a blog that keeps eBay community members aware of what is going on. Also, the Voices Program is an ongoing group of 300 active members that are invited in four to six times a year to function as an advisory group to eBay management.

The first loyalty tool at eBay was the Feedback System which was a way for the community to monitor itself. While the system is widely used, eBay still felt NPS was needed and has made it part of eBay's DNA. In fact, NPS is the only forward looking metric eBay uses. NPS is measured top down via an ongoing sampling of buyers and sellers. Bottom up NPS is measured at the transactional level. eBay is able to tie NPS to other online behaviors. NPS is used as a "Red Alert" to reach out to at risk, high value buyers.

The NPS program was not launched until this year, 2008. Counted as an early win is the fact that senior executives are now reading customer verbatim statements. And internal NPS workshops are driving action. A key early learning from implementing the program is knowing what to centralize and what to delegate; centralize data gathering, delegate insights and evangelism. The learning process is ongoing.

eBay's online community is the company's biggest asset. NPS is a primary used vehicle for staying in touch with Community members. While there were challenges in implementing NPS at eBay, it was considered well worth the effort.

One question from the audience was: Have you been able to track the value of an eBay community member? Kip responded that eBay is putting measures in place to link NPS with behavior. From this they hope to build a Net Promoter economics model.

A second question was "Why did he recommend a company take its time implementing NPS?" Kip made the analogy to "test markets." It is important to learn first since it is hard to recover from a false start.

Click here to download the presentation.

Driving Customer Led Growth through SMART Executive Sponsorship

info@netpromoter.com — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:41:27 GMT

I really enjoyed hearing Jana Eggers, the CEO for Spreadshirt, share her thoughts and "lessons learned" about NPS. A lot of what she shared can be applied directly to other businesses considering NPS as a key part of how they listen and respond to their customers.

One of the first things I learned during Jana's presentation was about Spreadshirt, the company she's managing as CEO. Spreadshirt is an internet enabled company that's a worldwide leader for creative, personalized apparel. It was started by a grad student in 2002 in Germany and has since grown to over 250 employees.

Spreadshirt has a direct-to-consumer business (with 700,000 customers) as well as 500,000 "shop partners" who design and sell customized T-shirts online via using Spreadshirt's platform and production capabilities. They've also got some large corporate clients such as CNN (where you can order a current headline on a T-shirt or jersey...how cool is that?).

Spreadshirt's key users are consumers who simply want to express themselves in a wide variety of creative ways through words and graphs on various types of apparel. Unlike a lot of their competitors, there's no minimum order quantity and they're proud of the "value for money" they offer their customers. Another key selling feature is most Spreadshirt orders are shipped within 48 hours of being submitted.

Before coming to Spreadshirt as their CEO, Jana spent some time with Intuit where she became a big fan of NPS. Intuit was one of the "early adopters" of Net Promoter and continues to be one of its biggest advocates. Jana successfully used verbatims from NPS surveys when she was in charge of QuickBase at Intuit to help identify and implement quick wins in the business.

When she arrived at Spreadshirt last year, the good news was the company was already a consumer-centric culture. The challenge was it didn't have an overall guiding customer metric for the customer voice to be heard. They needed a way to talk and think about their customers and needed to break away from the tendency to say "if customer service hasn't heard about an issue, it's not an issue we care about".

Jana has used NPS to make sure Spreadshirt has an aligned way of listening and responding to their customers from all over the world. She implemented NPS across all the business units in 2007 and made sure NPS data was an integral part of everyone's SMART goals (i.e. specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time bound).

Jana initially rolled out the NPS program in her core markets in three languages (German, English, French) with an email survey sent out to customers once a month. They have now included all their markets and do automatic email mailing after an order is placed or set-up.

They've also learned the wording of the invitation e-mail (such as subject heading) has a significant impact on the response rate to their NPS surveys. Based on this insight, they are continually experimenting with different e-mail subject headings and wording to improve their response rates.

Spreadshirt has developed some key early insights due to NPS which has led to a better understanding of their customers. For example, they've confirmed that Promoter re-order rates are 60% higher than that of Detractors. Additionally, customers who don't respond to their NPS surveys tend to have a similar NPS score as Detractors.

Having worked with NPS before at Intuit, Jana also appreciates that while the overall concept of NPS is simple to explain, it can be quite challenging to implement effectively across different markets. Another key lesson in implementing NPS she's applied at Spreadshirt is the critical need to balance short term vs. longer term issues.

For example, if you focus solely on long term issues, there's a danger of the organization giving up when they don't see progress in a relatively short time frame. If you focus solely on short term issues, you ignore the bigger strategic issues that are going to cause major problems in the future. The art and science of NPS is how to find the right mix of addressing both types of issues at the right time with the right team and resources.

Now that NPS data is coming in continuously from the various Spreadshirt markets, they've created an NPS dashboard that has all country data available for easy access. There's a "general assembly" for all employees held every month to review current business performance with only two PowerPoint slides (which should be a "gold standard" for any management meeting!). The first slide shows the number of shirts shipped the previous month and the second slide is an update on NPS data.

That's it...two slides....talk about focus! And it highlights the importance that NPS has at Spreadshirt to all employees on a regular basis.

A major point Jana made throughout her presentation is teaching all employees, especially new leaders, about the importance of NPS. Everyone in the organization should be familiar with your NPS scores and key drivers behind the scores.

It's important everyone in the organization understands you will get different NPS results due to cultural differences. For example, the US and UK scores tend to be higher than those from France and Germany. Additionally, smaller countries tend to have greater flux in their scores than larger countries.

That means there's a real risk of managers turning NPS scores to a contest to see "who's #1 and who's not". This belief would be a major detriment in making NPS a core part of how they manage the Spreadsheet business. To make sure this doesn't happen, Jana emphasizes that while everyone naturally likes to be #1, the important thing to remember is it's all about improvement in their NPS scores, not the absolute number.

So what's next for Spreadshirt and NPS? Jana outlined three key areas, including:

Understanding success factors that drive strong NPS scores
Continue to study country specifics (and what's needed to improve)
Benchmarking against other companies

That's it for this blog...now I'm going to think of a snappy NPS quote that I can put on a shirt and order on the Spreadshirt website!

Click here to download the presentation.

The Voice You Can't Ignore: Using NPS to Deepen the Conversation with Key Business Partners

info@netpromoter.com — Sat, 03 May 2008 06:50:21 GMT

How did an organization with a complex business arrangement that spans 4 continents, 18 countries and 110 business areas capture the voices of their key business partners? This is the story of HSBC's Net Promoter journey shared by Dr. Halina Miglus, Head of Customer Experience for HSBC Global Resourcing.

Program Objectives
Their goal was to have a deeper understanding on how they can build stronger relationships with their business partners, by identifying where they can provide the most value. The multi-faceted approach they adopted included identifying a common language, developing a centralized system and creating a framework to describe their relationships.

A common language was necessary to identify the key stakeholders. "Business Partners" were defined as individuals within the various HSBC business areas who have migrated business processes to HSBC global resourcing. "Customers" were defined as people who buy products and services from HSBC. This specificity was required to ensure that the insights gained were actionable at the right level.
The second area they focused on was determining and housing the population sample of stakeholders. Centralized systems were needed to detail the entire population of their business partner stakeholders.
Finally, a framework was developed to segment stakeholders by business entities, business areas and sites where the businesses have migrated to. They needed to form bridges not only to have a clear view of where they were but also to understand the businesses in greater depth.

In order to begin understanding the voice of business partners, they needed a program that would meet the following criteria:

Simple survey instrument
Fast turnaround time from survey launch to the time information was provided to stakeholders
Information that was actionable and would immediately drive relationship management and operational improvements.
Obtain honest, candid feedback from business partners  honest, specific input they can act on. (Incidently, one challenge they faced here was a cultural one, as South East Asian business practice norms dictated the need to "save face" as opposed to being upfront about their views.)
Provide management-at-a-glance reports
Have a simple metric and a streamlined method of measurement that helps the organisation to focus their efforts. (Net Promoter was chosen metric due to its simplicity and its relevance to their organisation.

About the Program
The first business partner survey was launched in May 2006 and ran for three weeks. They asked three questions in the survey:

Would you recommend?
Name three areas that we do well in.
Name three areas that we have not done well in.

It took less than 5 minutes to complete the survey and the initial response rates were fairly high, which was very encouraging and this grew as more people talked about the survey to their colleagues. She believed that their "less is more" survey approach encouraged higher than average participation levels (57% response rates resulting in a sample size of 612).

Dissemination of Results
The results were delivered in June 2006 at the HSBC Global Resourcing Management meeting. The negative scores got the attention of every single manager in the room that day. Finally they had a measurement that forced an objective, outside-in perspective of their business as opposed to the traditional defensive stance that they have adopted in the past.

To understand not just the score but the textures behind the score, they provided a visual output of the results that enabled every single business to have a reference to. An example was the slide used to depict individual scores for the Consumer Lending division. This was how they went a step further and provided another layer on top of the traditional Net Promoter Segmentation:

1,2 - Frozen detractors
3,4 - Cold detractors
5,6 - Warm detractors
7,8 - Passively satisfied
9,10 - Promoters

To provide that added texture to their insights, they recorded the verbatims and categorized them into areas that they have or have not done well in.

Dr. Miglus then went on to stress a critical factor that organisations should never ignore.. the "Human Factor". This is about recognizing that people with busy jobs needed time to wrap their heads around a concept no matter how simple it may seem.

They then adopted a two-pronged approach to cascade communications throughout the organisation. For the internal management team, the results were presented using simple but comprehensive visuals and intensive sessions were held to educate the senior management in the Net Promoter Program. For the business partners, the results briefings were led by the executive management and involving senior management. This was the turning point in the program. NPS became a conversation tool for the head of every business area represented in the survey and the results were discussed extensively.

Pilot Key Learnings
The initial results presentations and feedback from conversations with several business partners led to a reorganization of relationship management teams. The overriding theme was how they can best focus on unifying their efforts to improve the quality of their relationships with their business partners as opposed to the traditional siloed business unit approach. Elegant and streamlined communications played a significant part in increasing acceptance and adoption within the organisation.

They also wanted to take key learnings from the pilot and raised the bar for the survey in 2007. In addition to the previous requirements, further needs were identified and Satmetrix was chosen as the vendor to help them achieve the following goals:

Professionalize survey activities.
Benchmark capabilities. They had vast amounts of data but they wanted the capability to benchmark themselves across regions while taking into account cultural differences
Trending data. They wanted to keep data from their 2006 survey and as such future surveys needed to be fairly consistent with the original design.
Survey logic to obtain overall global resourcing scores as well as site-specific scores by regions.
Online access to results and a flexible on-demand tool for their senior management.

The Improved 2007 Program
The survey was launched at the end of November and continued through mid December 2007. They noted an overall positive increase with promoters outnumbering detractors and they were also able to provide additional benchmarking data across regions. From the pilot, they identified 6 areas of global resourcing performance that mattered to the business areas and for the new survey, they asked respondents to rate them on the following:

Part 1: Overall Ratings

Accuracy and attention to detail
Clear and concise communication (Balance between cultural differences)
Acting with the right level of urgency. (They have young staff whose average age was 25 and this has been an issue for them)
Ability to interpret and proactively address business needs
Exercising good judgment when handling exceptional cases

Part 2: Site Ratings

Part 3: Likelihood to respond to the survey in the future (80% said yes)

Program Outcomes
They upped the ante in ensuring that response rates remained consistently high and they achieved a 76% response rate, a 19% increase compared to the 2006 pilot. The results from the latest survey gave the business the ability to identify key areas where they needed to focus their improvement efforts on. They used a traffic light system to highlight key drivers of recommend by business areas within each business entity. This enabled them to shift the focus from just measuring their Net Promoter scores to how they can move the scores. The key drivers vary significantly by regions. For Asia Pacific, their key driver was "the ability to act with the right level of urgency" as opposed to North America whose key driver was "Exercising judgment for exceptions".

At the end of this exercise, they needed to understand the groupings and pull them together to drive continuous improvements across the business. As a result, relationship management teams are crystallizing their approach to working more effectively with business partners. However in some instances, the business needed to recognize and understand where it was impossible to move the dial no matter how much they tried. They have now adopted a more structured approach to how they manage the relationships with the business areas and it has become a dedicated endeavor with regular updates and discussions around key issues.

The online survey results software provided the necessary drill-down that they needed and it was accessible throughout all levels of the organisation. Continuous improvement actions are becoming part of the daily business conversations and interactions in HSBC. For example, how can they move business partners from one behavioural category to a higher level or what does it take to have more promoters. Ultimately they now understand the key drivers behind improving their services and have managed to take key learnings from each category and have applied it throughout the business.

Click here to download the presentation.

Back to the Future: Driving Growth in One of London's Oldest Industries

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 02 May 2008 02:34:16 GMT

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.

Using NPS to Drive Global Focus

info@netpromoter.com — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:36:16 GMT

Allianz is one of the world's largest insurance and financial services company. Their Customer Focus program is dedicated to creating a superior customer experience that maximizes customer loyalty, resulting in increased referrals, retention and cross-selling, profitable growth, and increased value for shareholders. Andrew Clayton, VP and Operations Director for Allianz, discussed their program.

The company has implemented a wide variety of Customer Focus tools to help them deliver on their promise to customers. These tools are organized around a framework focused on Listening, Learning and Change. NPS is measured from both a Top Down and Bottom Up perspective. The Top Down measures are used for management KPIs, to measure overall success of the program and benchmark against competitors. The Bottom Up perspective helps to mobilize front-line staff to be more customer-focused.

Linking NPS to organic growth is a critical factor in keeping top management attention. Allianz has convinced themselves of the linkage by not only tracking their own numbers, but by also studying competitive performances as well. Tracking the value of a Promoter vs. the value of a Detractor is key to driving the program.

Allianz has a 91% participation rate in their NPS surveys. Furthermore, customers are willing to participate in follow up calls. The participation rate seems high but perhaps Allianz has found a way to keep it short and rewarding.

For Allianz, as with other NPS practitioners, it's not about the number, but about driving continuous business improvements. The NPS program at Allianz is not a new one -- Andrew frequently made references to "we did that a number of years ago". One gets the picture of a mature program with wide participation by various parts of the organization.

Key success factors:

Have a well-defined scope
Include experts from your operations team
Set up a cross functional team
Effective communication
In-depth training
Early identification and implementation of quick wins
Recognize and reward success
Embed NPS as part of a performance measurement system

Mobilizing a large organization is not easy. It appears that the next move for Allianz is to institutionalize NPS.

Click here download the presentation.

Investing in Community and NPS to Drive Customer Loyalty

info@netpromoter.com — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:07:48 GMT

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.

Paul Marsden: Using NPS to Get Closer to Customers

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 01:09:59 GMT

Beatrice Dupuis, Directeur process et satisfaction abonnÃ©s with Groupe Neuf Cegetel, is introducing her talk - implementing a Net Promoter strategy in consumer call centers for Neuf Cegetel, a broadband supplier. Neuf Cegetel has a clear strategic vision to get closer to customers, address their needs and become the top rated supplier in terms of customer service - and is using NPS to do this. Neuf Cegetel outsource call centers and use Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a quality/satisfaction index to counterbalance productivity metrics they use as KPIs for call centers.

Beatrice is explaining how the purchase of AOL France has helped them understand key NPS drivers because of its position as

Top in customer service

Lowest in churn levels

Highest recommendation level

Key NPS drivers for call centers

Accessibility

First call resolution

Agent politeness

Added Value (surprise factor)

Neuf are learning from AOL actions to improve performance on these critical success factors

Accessibility - number of agents, scheduling resource availability, anti-absenteeism initiative, and for consumers development of self-care online tools

First call resolution - training agents to understand and solve problems quickly

Agent politeness - training agents communication skills - but no scripts

Added value (surprise factor) - giving information on new products, new intranet portal for agents to keep up to date on latest offers

The success of these initiatives is allowing Neuf Cegetel to build a business case for rolling a Net Promoter strategy across the business.

Beatrice is saying that Neuf are early on the NPS journey but are already learning lessons including:

Critical importance of marketing the strategy internally and with call center partners

Key to communicate results internally and with call center partners

Necessity of identifying the weight of call center Net Promoter in overall satisfaction

A great story involving two implementations of Net Promoter.

Paul Mardsen on De La Rue's "My Contribution"

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 00:56:50 GMT

So here we are - a room full of people with our eyes closed pointing where we think north is - hands pointing in every direction. Andy Brierley, Project Director of De La Rue, is up on stage, telling us that our random and varied pointing about sums up De La Rue's customer focus strategy before they embraced the (Net Promoter Score) NPS.

Andy's talking about how they have harnessed employee ideas to dramatically improve customer experience reflected in turnaround in NPS figures (UK) from -34 to +34, and made productivity gains of Â£38m in two years (global). Wow.

De La Rue's "My Contribution" initiative is an employee scheme that invites employees to identify business improvement solutions, implement them as projects, and get rewarded for them. Focus is to be on solving customer, employee (or shareholder problems).

Andy has put up a De La Rue â€˜jam' of the classified ad that Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton took out to recruit for an expedition

"Men Wanted for Hazardous Journey. Small Wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and Recognition in case of Success."

The challenge for De La Rue has been to embrace empowerment (allowing employees to drive the program), permission (turning employees into stakeholders for project implementation) and measurement.

"My Contribution" Program success is measured in terms of improvements to customer NPS and value of initiatives implemented. Key factors in making "My Contribution" work include

Communicating program effectively across business

Creating program champions in each site

Training - giving employees problem solving, project management and facilitation tools

Peer review of suggested ideas - rank, rate, comment

Reporting and demonstration of successful projects

Rewarding employees - "Spotlight" initiative where project managers of top project present their initiative to senior management

Getting critical mass in terms of contribution

Andy's is a refreshing jargon-free zone - but can't help thinking that his "My Contribution" program is a gold standard exercise in applied Wikinomics - using mass collaboration and collective intelligence to drive customer experience - NPS - and therefore growth. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Final flourish - chart of De La Rue stock price over the period "My Contribution" has been delivering results, massively outperforming competition. I am inspired.

Paul Marsden: Using Net Promoter in Market Segmentation and Product Design

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 00:23:04 GMT

We began the Process Excellence track with a presentation from HSBC's Nadya Hijazi.

A Little Context

Because HSBC is such a large, global company it's difficult to present themselves cohesively to their customers. Perceptions of their customers differ widely based on where they are located and which part of HSBC they work with.

And, HSBC have a very competitive environment in which they must make a multi-million dollar investment in HSBCnet, introducing new functionality, and supporting geographic expansion.

What They Did
HSBC needed a compelling metric at high level that would provide actionable data  one question and diagnostics was used to hit the ground running. A key point was that Nadya worked with the business teams to define the diagnostic questions  but she would only allow their questions to be included if they were ready to action the answer. That's a great way to ensure action takes place!

HSBC surveyed 27,000 customers across 24 countries with a complete survey of the end-to-end customer experience. The last two questions were NPS and why? HSBC also made sure that they included the end users in the survey, not just the decision makers.

Nadya presented three findings around detractors:

14% of end users who were detractors made 6 or more calls into call center vs. 7% of promoters. That adds up to serious costs. This higher cost-to-serve goes across all aspects of HSBC brand  whether experience is personal or professional.

Quality was critical for the customer, and a major factor for customer dormancy and attrition.

Satisfaction survey  good measure, but NPS more powerful. Only "delighted" were likely to be promoters. "Satisfied" were more likely to be detractors. This surprising finding upset some people who thought they were doing a good job with a 70% satisfaction rating, but their NPS didn't tie up.

She concludes NPS is a measurement of the quality of the relationship versus satisfaction with specific event.

Put It in Context

Nadya related two key things to understand to correctly put your Net Promoter score in context: cultural differences and competition. HSBC found that their top scoring countries were the same as in the Satmetrix white paper. Furthermore, 75% of HSBC customers are multi-banked. They asked their customers to rate and rank their competitors in country which gave evidence of their relative position in market segment in that country. Key learning: do not compare country to country without knowing the cultural bias and competitive climate. It is more important to benchmark in country, and incentivize on local transactional NPS.

How to Move That Score? Innovate by Involving Your Customers!

Nadya implemented a technique called "tryvertising"  beta test online changes on their internet banking platform. They identified main issues, and asked users to road test and give feedback. It was quite revolutionary, as they used detractors and passives as the focus group for the issue. They were able to increase NPS 20%.

Second, involve lots of customers. Don't just use 5-10 people in focus group, involve everyone  she ran webinars with her channel across 3 regions. HSBC got excellent feedback, and had a big impact on their customers' perception of them, which proved to be good for morale for product team and customer! And it cuts out a lot of discussion about what to do, as the improvement design comes straight from customer's mouth.

How Do You Improve the Impact of the Multi-Million Dollar Investment?

NPS alone is not the remedy to everything. Understand how to make changes that strike a balance. Prioritize your customer issues and invest in what cuts across many of your customers, or what costs you your most valuable customers. But, remember, much of what you do is baseline or expected  it will minimize detractors, but will not create promoters.

An interesting technique on increasing response rates is to phrase questions around how the customer expresses something directly  this struck a chord for HSBC customers and doubled their response rates.

Nadya gave us lots to think about.

Scott Smith: Driving Net Promoter into Your Organization

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 00:10:46 GMT

SinÃ©ad Kwant of Philips International quotes Dr. Morris Massey: "The gate for any change is always unlocked from the inside." This was a very engaging presentation if you count the number of hands going up asking questions at its end. If I was to summarize, the key ingredient that drove the success of the Net Promoter program at Philips is to gain the hearts and minds of employees. Employees engaged in the customer experience will deliver happy customers stated SinÃ©ad.

The challenge was large for Philips. They needed to get 120,000 employees to believe in the customer experience or the program would have failed. They have had success. So how did they do this?

Well first, it is Philips' ambition is to become a truly market-driven organization delivering profitable growth. A key part of this is to build loyal Philips customers using Net Promoter. Navigating change is hard, as SinÃ©ad states. So there were four key areas of the journey to build the program and engage employees:

Awareness

Understanding

Buy-in, and

Commitment.

The awareness objective was to introduce the concept of Net Promoter into the organization  this started at the top with Philips CEO Gerard Kleisterlee who became a vocal advocate. Senior leaders went to the call center and started to listen to customers. This really motivated the support center staff. Proof points and pilot projects were done to prove the concept and win over internal detractors.

The next stage was to understand the data and deliver the evidence that Net Promoter works. Philips proved that there were tangible benefits from moving passives and detractors to promoters. SinÃ©ad gave the example of positive growth in market categories where they were Net Promoter leaders. As Net Promoter leader, they out-performed their competitors, seeing a 4% annual growth above the market average. Where they worst-in-class they underperformed the market by 3%. I guess that Net Promoter is tied to growth!

Building buy-in was next. First, they did the voyage of discovery. Two hundred executives went to talk to leading companies to learn how to engage their employees. They talked with FedEx, Starbucks, GE and other leading loyalty companies to learn what best practices worked.

Last is commitment  secure commitment to structure, resources, expertise and next steps to deepen deployment of the Net Promoter program. Also important is training, business workshops, and other employee communication strategies to get everyone up to speed.

When asked in the Q&A, SinÃ©ad stated one of the key learnings of this whole journey is to keep it simple. Do not over analyze the data. Previous satisfaction studies did not allow them to act on the drivers of the data nor engage employees. As SinÃ©ad stated, this is an on-going process for Philips. They have already seen positive results, but there is more to come.

Suhail Khan: Energising Your Business around NP - Swiss Re

info@netpromoter.com — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 00:02:11 GMT

My second session was another enjoyable interactive presentation delivered by Steve Dee from Swiss Reinsurance Company (Swiss Re). The session, which included everything from teaching the audience a magic trick (pulling a rabbit out of a hat, literally, ok, albeit a baby stuffed plush rabbit) to covering the Net Promoter program efforts at Swiss Re, was full of insightful data suggestions that can help companies who are just starting the NP journey.

Steve came to Swiss Re from GE where he had successfully implemented a Net Promoter program. The challenge at Swiss Re was what Steve referred to as a "Client Focus Dilemma": how to drive client retention and increase wallet share while defining client centric measurement metrics.

Using the classic Net Promoter question as a foundation ("How likely is it that you would recommend Company X to a colleague or friend"), Steve created a program that has been able to deliver data that has already driven positive change within Swiss Re.

Swiss Re took a unique approach and asked its customers if they would be interested in spending more survey time, thus providing Swiss Re with more insights that could drive positive customer-centric change. Based on the customer agreement, Swiss Re created a database of customers who were willing to be surveyed and drove the process on an annual basis.

Communication, communication, communication. Some of the best practices that Swiss Re uses to drive organizational change include the NPS Care package: a packet of information targeted at the various functional audiences throughout Swiss Re that includes:

NPS Overview
Deployment Process
Deployment Plan
Dashboard Example
Results Example
FAQs
Copy of the 2003 HBR article
Other success stories

Steve shared that success came because Swiss Re followed a plan that kept the process simple, the focus clear, attained leadership commitment, regular communication and took a phased program approach, using a Pilot site to work out the bugs.

Suhail Khan: From Hearsay to Hard Data - Aggreko

info@netpromoter.com — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 23:54:38 GMT

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.