Fred Reichheld, author of The Ultimate Question, kicked off our afternoon with a discussion of the economical ways that companies can delight customers. How do you get from a 20% Net Promoter Score to 80% without “breaking the bank”?

Fred explained that the best companies may not measure NPS any better than others. But what they do extremely well is to find systematic ways to delight the customer without spending a lot of money. He used examples from U.S. fast-food chain Chick Fil-A to illustrate the point. They do many things that are different from other fast food restaurants, including:

• having the manager work in the front of the store
• keeping umbrellas on hand for customers on a rainy day
• refreshing drinks for free
• stationing an employee outside at the drive-thru to greet people

Fred continued the discussion with a video from Internet retailer Zappos.com, which was developed to support Chick Fil-A with its own employee training. It includes some great examples of Zappos.com employees at work, having fun. And the culture was illustrated by quotes from their CEO, Tony Hsieh, such as these:

“My passion never has been about shoes. It’s about service and culture.”

And, showing his “desk,” which was an open cube, Tony commented “The best way to have an open door policy is just to not have a door in the first place.”

Tony’s comments also echoed the value of creating more Promoters in a business. Mr Hsieh’s thinking:“Let’s take all the money we would have spent on marketing, and instead, invest it in the customer experience so that customers will do the marketing for us.”

As Fred explained, Zappos.com was successful with this strategy. Last year, Amazon.com bought the business for $1.2 billion. Selling shoes online could be thought of as a commodity business. But by figuring out ways to “wow” customers, Zappos.com was able to successfully differentiate itself and grow.

Fred stressed the central role of the employee experience in making this work, with examples from U.S. airline company Jet Blue. He also shared some examples of frugal wow at American Express, which focuses these innovations at 3 specific points in their customer interaction: early engagement with the company, getting a replacement card, and making a merchant dispute.

Fred’s last example was from IT hosting company, Rackspace. He explained how Rackspace focuses its entire organisational structure around service. Not just training, but also the way they structure their service teams…in a matrix with all of the required resources to serve the customer’s needs working in a close-knit unit. We had several members of the Rackspace team in the audience, and Fred took comments from them and from other audience members who shared their own stories of frugal wow.

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Deborah Eastman, Chief Marketing Officer at Satmetrix, led a discussion about different methods for motivating employees to drive customer-centric culture. The dilemma…should it be about pride or money? Deborah illustrated the importance of non-financial motivation in conversation with 3 guest speakers.

Life Financial Group: the “Wow Branch” Mentality

Deb started by interviewing Irina Chichmeli of Life Financial, a network of Russian retail banks. They survey about 3000 customers per month, and the feedback goes directly to the branch manager who is empowered to take action at the branch and escalate requests to the central processing groups for systematic process changes. Life Financial never tried to tie NPS to bonuses for the branch managers. Instead, their focus was to educate the branch managers on how NPS linked to long-term financial results, and short-term measures at the branch such as new customer acquisition. Making this connection was all it took to get branch level buy-in.

Irina also explained the importance of employee recognition programmes. They award branches for overall performance, including NPS, and they give out “Wow Branch” awards. Each branch who gets this award is given money that they can use for anything from teambuilding to improvements at their branch to support customer experience. It’s critical to give the branch autonomy in deciding how to spend the money, which reinforces the empowerment they want to convey for branches to find ways of succeeding with their customers.

They also have a programme called the “Wow Differentiating” programme. This programme’s goal is to engage employees in finding ways to delight customers. This is different from solving customer problems. It is focused instead on anticipating customer needs and doing things to delight them. Irina gave several examples, including one branch that purchased complimentary passport covers to give out to customers when they had to submit passports for copying. This little extra was so popular with customers that they introduced the practice in other branches across the company.

Experian: Customer Context “is” the KPI

Doreen Byrnes and Jock Busuttil of Experian described how they involve all parts of their organisation in the customer promise by using a common language and a common set of goals. Accomplishing this started with a broad internal communication programme, and it shows up in all aspects of the day-to-day decision making.

Jock described how his product management team uses customer feedback to put KPIs into context. The KPIs themselves are just an outcome. It’s the feedback from the customer that clarifies what is needed to really move the KPIs in the right direction.

Jock told a story of a product upgrade that put pressure on a particular customer relationship. Most customers had moved over to the new version and the company was planning to discontinue support. While the customer was contractually obliged to move, their account manager, Ben, knew that the customer was a Promoter and didn’t want to spoil the trusted relationship that had been built up over the years.

Jock and Ben visited the customer to come up with a plan for making the transition, and they made the decision to extend support for the customer in the interest of their long-term loyalty. This is one small example of how they have been able to maintain retention rates of more than 90%.

Verizon Business: “One Team” of more than 200,000!

Paul Vincent of Verizon Business described how they drive a sense of pride across more than 200,000 employees who serve their corporate and government clients worldwide. How does such a large organisation go about creating a “wow” factor?

For Verizon, it all starts with 5 service excellence imperatives:

1. Deliver service consistently worldwide

2. Proactive, responsive, reliable support

3. Best-in-class service management

4. World-class customer enablement

5. Customer-centric continuous improvement

What really struck me was the consistent approach to employee engagement that Paul described. They have a very deliberate strategy to have the same roles and organisational structure worldwide. Paul called this their “one team” approach, which allows them to deliver consistent service to customers who, like Verizon Business, operate globally. He then elaborated on a series of employee award programmes that form the foundation for motivating their “one team” of “teams” to deliver customer delight.

The results are impactful. They have seen a 23 point improvement in their Net Promoter Score and 27% increase in sales of strategic services.

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