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.

Laura Brooks from Satmetrix discussed the importance of building trusted relationships with customers and employees and how that results in the economics of word of mouth. She started with recent research in high tech, financial services and telecommunication industries that showed trusted relationships had a stronger correlation to recommend scores then product or service performance. This was true of vendors with both one-off point solutions as well as broader solutions. Product innovation is not sufficient, buyers want a trusted partnership.

Critical to building trusted partnerships with customers is having trusted partnerships with employees.  She referenced other conference speakers that shared the importance of engaging employees in improving NPS scores. More mature Net Promoter programs go beyond engaging employees to evaluating the Employee Net Promoter Score (EPS). Without loyal employees you cannot create loyal customers and achieve results. Employees want to be valued and know their values are in alignment with the organization. Drivers of employee loyalty include being consulted, collecting their feedback, and rewarding for results.

Employee Promoters are more likely to be customer facing. People feel they are valued in these roles and they feel their contribution is important in the context of the company's strategic direction. The Allianz presentation yesterday discussed how they connect the front office to the back office. Laura suggested that getting both the front office and back office people following up with customers helps the back office employees better connect to the customer.

Now that we have discussed trusted relationships with both customers and employees, let's connect that to word of mouth. Most of us know that the old advertising model of broadcast communication is broken: 76% of people don't trust advertising. Today's marketing is about word of mouth. According to Forrester Research, 80% trust word of mouth more than any other source.

Word of mouth is no longer constrained to the water cooler. Research shows that word of mouth is on the rise. The Net Promoter research data shows referrals increased 8% over the last year across all industries and in some industries as much as 18%. This is largely driven by consumer generated media and online social networking.  It is estimated that the top dozen social networking sites have over 30 million users. In this connected world, people desire dialogue with brands and with each other.

Next, Laura introduced the concept of NetWorked Promoters, those that are more connected and tend to have a bigger impact on word of mouth. NetWorked promoters are a special subset of your promoters.  They refer more, are more socially connected and credible and tend to be more charismatic.  When studying online communities she found that 80% of the ideas voted as most popular in the community typically come from this group.  Focusing efforts on the few NetWorked Promoters can extend reach and influence over a large number of people.

Let's now look at the economics of word of mouth. Customer value is made up of both referral economics and buyer economics. Net Promoter measures both loyalty and total customer worth that lead to organic growth.

Laura shared research from 2007 for the B2C computer hardware industry and mentioned two other studies coming out, one on the credit card industry and the other on the wireless industry. In this model Satmetrix found that the B2C hardware industry has a NPS of 27%. By contrast, Apple has a NPS of 78%. She then shared how that impacts the bottom line.

• Promoters spend more. The research showed Apple customers spend 1.5 times more than the industry average and promoters spend 1.3 times more. Apple Promoters refer positively on average 90% of the time vs. 75% for the industry average.
• Referrals. The research showed that in the B2C hardware industry, average promoters refer 78% of the time and detractors have negative referrals 29% of the time.  But detractors have 4 times the impact than promoters.

This research has been put into an economic model that would be difficult to describe on this blog.  CLICK HERE to download the white paper, titled Net Promoter Economics: The Impact of Word of Mouth.

The key takeaways from Laura's presentation

• Today's buyers want trustworthy relationships with your organization.
• Strategies for building trust based relationships include Employee Promoter Score (EPS) and NPS
• Word of mouth economics are driven by buying and referral behaviors
• Promoters spend more and refer more
• NetWorked promoters have higher referral rates through connected word of mouth
• The key to Net Promoter economics is TRUST.

Click here to download the presentation.