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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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:

1. Would you recommend?
2. Name three areas that we do well in.
3. 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.

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