The second presentation of the day was delivered by Dominique Soudais who is responsible for customer experience at Orange. Orange is an international company providing fixed line, mobile and Internet services. They have 170 million customers on 5 continents.

Orange uses Net Promoter as a lever for organisational change, referring to it as the "magic KPI."  Their goal is to help customers be more empowered and achieve more where they live, work and play.  Their strategy for growth includes investing in new technologies, such as fiber, that deliver incremental value for customers.  This strategy requires increased focus on customer experience and word of mouth.

Why did Orange use NPS as driver for change?

• Customer demands continue to rise and points of interaction expand across mobile, land and internet connectivity.
• Purchases are more complex, typically multi-step and multi-channel.
• Consumers have strong expectations for advice and help.
• Consumers often seek word of mouth when considering a purchase.

While Orange has always had a strong customer satisfaction culture, practices were heterogeneous and limited to satisfaction measures. In February 2007 they began measuring NPS. Initially they focused on improving the critical steps of the customer journey and motivating teams to encourage cross-organisational actions. They found that calling back customers was very effective at helping to build a customer-driven culture.

The results are impressive, with an increase of 6 points in 8 months. They have set a target to increase by an additional 10 points in 2008.

Dominique highlighted one of NPS's greatest benefits -- understanding by everyone in the organization.  He went on to discuss the personal element of Orange employees and their willingness to promote the brand and collect feedback in personal settings. This personal association with Promoters and Detractors made them an ambassador for the brand with a personal responsibility to create Promoters.

Some of their lessons learned include:

• NPS is a reliable and meaningful KPI.
• Create value across the customer journey.
• Identify where it hurts.
• Benchmark performance across operational units.

He shared data that proved a direct correlation between churn rates and NPS, once again demonstrating the financial benefits of NPS.  They also found that Promoters bought 2.5X Detractors.  This is a critical factor in their growth given the cross-sell opportunities their product extentions offer.

Among the factors of recommendation, customer experience is the most important, making up 40% of their overall NPS.  Measuring NPS after interactions allows them to continuously improve the customer experience and improve NPS.  He shared two stories of monitoring NPS at key touch points and how the front line was able to deliver measurement improvements in NPS through verbatim analysis and management incentives.

At the end Dominique shared their plans for 2008:

• Gain a better understanding of what creates Promoters.
• Simplify the customer journey.
• Investigate a speech recognition tool to collect feedback.
• Use NPS as a KPI for the general management community throughout Europe.
• Continue to increase NPS in consumers' minds.

Another story of an organisation using NPS to drive cultural change to focus on the customer and achieving measureable results!

Click here to download the presentation.