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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Frank McCusker, Director Client Management for Satmetrix EMEA, set us straight on the basics of running a successful NPS program. If NPS isn’t built on a solid foundation, it usually doesn’t lead to the desired results.

The first foundation is Program Design. 

• Be clear about the results you want out of improving your customer loyalty. Typically, customer retention, more repurchases, and generating customer referrals. 
• Be clear about the kinds of actions you are going to take to get those results – which are incremental operational improvements, and which are more radical strategic improvements.
• What infrastructure do you need to support customer centricity?  Do you lack processes to align internal activities to customer value creation, or do your existing processes force people to focus inward and ignore the customer?  Do your ICT systems support the customer?  Processes and tools are only enablers, but having the right ones makes the overall goal of creating net promoters much easier.
• Does your executive team fully understand and support NPS?  Is it fully integrated into your strategy and operations, across functions or is it a bolt-on activity that just sits in one department?  This seems like common sense, but it’s easy for organizations to compartmentalize NPS …and then they think it doesn’t work because no improvements happen in the organization and there is no change in customer perceptions, or the bottom line….
• And finally you can worry about the questionnaire design.  Short and relevant, reflecting  the key pain points of your key stakeholders.   Typically questionnaires are designed by committee and they end up to be too long and redundant.  Here is the acid test for every question:  what action can you take internally based on the answers to that question?  If you’re not going to act on it, don’t ask it.  

• Get the right customers.  Don’t just go and ask finance or sales which are the right customers.  Dig everywhere and get a healthy sample from these segments:  end users, influencers, decision-makers. Again the acid test for whether a stakeholder or customer should be included in the sample:  Are you willing to make business decisions based on the data that comes from this group? 
• B2C companies should take a representative sample of their targeted segments and extrapolate from there.
• B2B companies, you need to measure every single one of your key clients who drive 80% of your sales and profitability….because each one matters.
• Timing is also important – measuring at a logical time for the customer, but also at a time when you are prepared to quickly analyse the data, get back to customers and start acting on the data.

• You have to follow up with your customers.  Decide which situations require which kind of follow-up.
• Who internally should conduct the follow-up?  Ideally, someone the customers believe has the power to make changes.
• When will the follow-up be done?  (Best practice - within 48 hours if practical…whatever, stick to it and monitor it and make sure people do it).
• What should happen afterward?  How should it be handled?  For example, will you include in your annual report a section about customer feedback and what you’re doing to address it?

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