European Conference Blog 2011

Dell: Empowering your Organisation in the Virtual Era

info@netpromoter.com — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 16:07:10 GMT

It was great to have Rishi Dave, Executive Director of Online Marketing for Large Enterprise and Public (B2B) at Dell with us for the final session of the conference. Not exactly the best speaking spot of the two days which is why it needs to be a dynamic and inspirational presenter that ends the conference experience - and Rishi did not disappoint.

Being in the "virtual era" as we are today, the way in which companies do business has to transform to meet the new demands. And the demands on virtual experience are not just from the younger generations. Did you know that the average age of the social-networker is 31? And that the average social-gamer is a 43 year old woman called Beryl? (That's a joke about the name - but the age and gender is correct.) And another type of network in the virtual world is the dating network - 12.5% of all couples in the US who got married in 2010 met online.

Customer opinion has moved to be a driving force in this environment. Companies cannot hide from their customers, or their customers feedback and views. Today’s audience of "influencers" is much broader - it's not just about advertising and media spend. It’s the power of the individual. We can all reach thousands of people with our opinions through the communication channels available today. FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace... What we chose to communicate can reach a world of potential purchasers online.

Dell are working to stay ahead of the curve. Bitten by social media in the past, they are not going to be found sleeping on the job. They work on staying connected with their customers in a number of different ways.

Dell’s "Ideastorm" website - where customers can share ideas on how Dell can improve. More than just a virtual suggestion box it allows the company to listen in a structured and innovative way
Social Media Command Centre - akin to something from NASA. Approximately 22,000 online mentions are tracked every day.
Driving peer to peer support through forums where ideas and resolutions are shared and validated by the best engineers
Top rank electronics bods - working on specific problems even for those contacts who are not yet customers

And what makes a rock star at Dell? Someone who goes the extra mile to support their customers - and who visiting clients ask to meet when they come to Dell HQ.

Sometimes I wonder about the real impact of social media. But looking at the tweeting, blogging, facebooking and other virtual noise that this conference alone has created - I am pretty sure that we will continue to see the impact grow.

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ING: At the Heart of Everything We Do

info@netpromoter.com — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:19:46 GMT

Isabelle Conner, Global Head of Marketing at ING Group, showed us how ING place their clients at the heart of everything ING does. Isabelle presented at the London conference 2 years ago, so it was great to have this follow-up and understanding of how they have progressed their client focus over the last couple of years.

ING has over 85 million clients across more than 40 countries and these clients are serviced by more than 105,000 employees. Isabelle described the importance of leveraging the massive network of their global workforce to deliver experiences that create brand adocates.

When it comes to buying insurance or banking services, 60% of people base their decisions on the recommendations of friends, family and colleagues. This reliance on the knowledge of people that you know has increased since the recent financial crisis. Customers are skeptical about advertising messages, they trust the experience of people close to them.

Since Word of Mouth carries more weight than advertising, ING is harnessing the power of their promoters by delivering on their brand promise. Theirs is a straightforward mission:

Be easy to contact
Be fast and efficient
Provide clarity and transparency in all dealings
And give clear, professional advice to customers

Simplicity is often the best approach. Over complicating the offering can muddy the waters in terms of service delivery. ING keep it clean and crisp with a very clear view of what they need to achieve and why. And the Net Promoter discipline provides them with a framework for success.

The results so far are showing that ING are on the right track. Their NPS has shown improvement as they have taken the action required to make a difference to the customer experience. Isabelle described their six-step plan for rolling out NPS in each country:

Secured commitment to the program from the top down
Established an ING framework and language for NPS
Added in customisation that allowed for local flavour in each country
Trained all staff in true closed loop follow-up
Analysed and understood the feedback on an ongoing basis
Acted on the specific feedback to improve the experience

Isabelle concluded by sharing examples of employee activities that are driving change from the grass roots in different countries. There were several members of the ING team in attendance who joined Isabelle on stage and who answered questions about the programmes they had implemented in their area to support customer-focused innovations and improvements.

The ongoing challenge is now to maintain the momentum - especially when different countries and leadership teams are at different levels of engagement with the NPS rollout. However, with an ongoing focus on both operational and behavioural elements, ING are in good shape for future success.

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CHEP & Satmetrix: How to WOW Your Customers!

info@netpromoter.com — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 09:57:44 GMT

Creating the WOW Factor: Using Cross Functional Teams to Close the Loop

Carey Sealy, Director of Customer Loyalty Programmes, CHEP
Dr Laura Brooks, Vice President of Innovation and Strategy, SATMETRIX

Dr Laura Brooks kicked off the session explaining what Closing the Loop is and how one can effectively do this using various methods.

Essentially, it all comes down to ensuring you get back to the customer to make them realise that their feedback is valued and does matter. Its about communicating what has been learnt and what will be actioned. This strengthens relationships.

Carey Sealy explained the journey that CHEP have embarked on, rolling out Net Promoter throughout the world. As a leader in their field without many notable competitors, they had to break away from a situation of complacency.

They embarked on Net Promoter, placing it at the heart of their customer centricity drive, actively asking customers for feedback. The key was their closed-looped strategy of getting cross functional teams involved in the process. This not only resulted in increased buy-in, but created more accountability and responsibility.

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Virgin Media: When you love your job and NPS, the success is guaranteed

info@netpromoter.com — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:23:51 GMT

Phil Stewart, Director of Customer Service Virgin Media Business, shared with us his experience with NPS application in a B2B environment.

He explained how important is to learn working in a effective way with NPS:

Assess who owns NPS in our organization
Take care of “Quality and quantity” of contacts
Be effective in closing loop process
Pay attention to front line engagement
Decide who is to focus on detractors or promoters, or both
Involve senior leadership - really get them to engage
Spotting who is not on the bus
Position NPS effectively both internally and externally to the right audiences

By taking this approach, how has the organisation seen the fruits of their labour?

Proactive loyalty team established for smaller customers
Advanced Customer Experience (ACE) team in Fault Management Centre established for major complex customers
Mandatory NPS measure in everyone’s annual objectives
All customer contact and complaint responses improved
NPS feedback used to secure investment for new customer billing portal

Does anybody have further thoughts or advice on how to establish a successful NPS in a B2B environment?

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Novartis/iBuzcon: NPS, both to measure the customer loyalty and increase customer engagement

info@netpromoter.com — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:12:22 GMT

Martin Gore (Novartis Animal Health) and Glenn Jones (Ibuzcon) presented a great application of NPS.

To understand the impact of their relationship with veterinary practices, they set up a brief survey for visitors at the practices to answer the Recommend question at the end of their visit. This was a very good and clever way to build strong relationships with clients; Novartis Animal Health really demonstrated how they could be a real partner of Veterinary Practices.

As a result of working so closely with the practices, the main results can be summarized as follows:

Increase of 5% above projected growth rates for participating practices
Leverage PET (Patient Experience Tracker) to achieve additional product listings / drive trials
Grow Novartis Practice Development & National Account Managers into true business partners
Access to wider range of key decision makers in practice and head office
Strengthen relationships with key customers
Build new relationships in accounts where historically Novartis was behind his competitors

Have you ever thought of NPS as a way to both measure customer experience and to increase customer engagement at the same time?

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Virgin Active: Test Your Programme's True Fitness

info@netpromoter.com — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:01:15 GMT

Focus on Customer Feedback to Test Your Programme's True Fitness

Shirley Wilson-Brown, Head of Member Relations and Member Insight, Virgin Active UK

There are many health clubs in the UK but most don't compete with Virgin Active. Why? Because Virgin Active differentiate themselves through emotion connections and the continuous building of relationships with their members.

Virgin Active chose NPS as a means of steering them on this journey as it was simple and easy to buy into. However, it is not all about the metric. Virgin Active's focus has been on seeing things through the eyes of their customers. Every month, feedback is collated and shared amongst the team. There are even daily breakfast reports to see what ad hoc feedback was collated the day before and see if anything can be improved upon.

Focus Groups are also held whereby customers are invited to a discussion form to see what could be improved. It is this relentless drive to engage with the customer that always ensures the customer is continuously on top of mind.

Shirley really made these concepts come to life in the presentation - and the audience was also appreciative of the fitness gifts that she shared! You should have been there.

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Philips: Sense & Simplicity...and the role of Social Media

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:55:45 GMT

It was great to have Suhail Khan, VP and Head of Global NPS at Philips, back with us to present at the conference this year - and he gave an interesting presentation on the NPS journey, development and success at Philips.

Philips have a brand promise of sense and simplicity and they differentiate themselves through their innovation process, the way in which they develop customer relationships and the focus from their own staff on providing a superior customer experience. But with Social Media becoming the #1 activity on the web, they have recognised that there are areas into which they must expand to keep the customer promise fresh and focused.

200 million users joined facebook in one year...and 34% of bloggers blog about products and brands. In this environment it's not enough to know that this is happening - you need to know what people are saying - and you need to find the best way to respond. With only 14% of consumers trusting advertising, companies need to be reaching - and reaching positively - the 78% of consumers who give and rely on peer-to-peer recommendations.

For Philips, NPS has relevance in their business to:

Grow revenue and profitability whilst enhancing customer relationships
Strength the points of differentiation
Deliver the desired experience
And leverage promoters to create positive buzz - or word of mouth - which will grow revenue.

And social media is a part of that strategy.

Philips Healthcare is using Net Promoter and Social Media strategies to turn health-care into human-care through the approach of active listening. They connect social media streams to NPS strategies to deliver a holistic experience for their customers. Guidance comes from a global level but delivery, execution and empowerment is based at the local level. Whilst Marketing makes the promise to the customer, the Service organisation is then responsible for keeping the promise. And the Social Media strategy is part of delivering on the promise.

First thing is to LISTEN, and then the service teams can ENGAGE with and provide SUPPORT to the customers. Particularly where there is negative sentiment, the idea is to change this into positive promotion. Similarly to other companies such as Apple and Dell, Philips are also driving channels for peer-to-peer support. More than 50% of questions from customers are answered by other customers. Suddenly it's not just a conversation, it's a community of support and engagement. Effectiveness overall is measured using very simple KPIs (upholding the brand statement) and the main focus is on the delivery of true support.

Philips are achieving a positive experience through their integrated strategies and focus on NPS and Social Media. Before you step into that journey and ask yourself:

Is our company ready for Social Media?
Is our service organisation ready and empowered for Social Media?
Is our Social Media operation ready and effective?

If the answer to those questions is yes - then you too can see the positive results that Philips have realised.

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Bain & Co: The Net Promoter Flywheel

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 14:35:51 GMT

Rob Markey, Partner and Global Head of Customer Strategy and Marketing Practice at Bain & Company, is always an entertaining presenter particularly when the focus of the presentation is so close to his heart.

The Net Promoter Flywheel is the concept of driving employee and customer advocacy to a point where the momentum of each continues to drive the other. As Rob says, it's not entirely clear if there is a true cause and effect relationship here - where you can definitively say that the one drives the other - but it is clear that the most successful organisations have a focus on both.

The Net Promoter Score started with just 2 companies - GE and Intuit. 8 years on and there are thousands of companies using the metric but the most advanced organisations have recognised that it is a discipline - not just a score. NPS doesn't really mean Net Promoter Score anymore - it means Net Promoter System. Companies that have recognised that a metric alone is not enough, have moved forward with a whole discipline that includes a sound executive foundation, closed loop follow-up, business change processes and, perhaps most impactfully, the engagement of both employees and customers in driving a better experience all round.

Rob celebrated several companies who have really achieved a true sense of customer-centricity and who have, through doing so, enjoyed some of the highest Net Promoter scores in their industry. But this has only come to pass because they did not focus on the score, they focused on the delivery of a great experience. Think jetBlue, SouthWest Airlines, American Express.

If you don't have an army of employee promoters, how can you expect to create an army of customer promoters? When a company recognises the importance of fully engaging with their employees - there are few limits to what you can achieve.

Employee promoters are empowered, they use words like "valued", "effective" "learn and grow" and they believe in the company they serve - are PROUD to serve. Turning employees into promoters requires going beyond satisfaction. To create true employee advocacy, a company must create differentiators by providing extraordinary opportunities for purpose and accomplishment or the chance to have extraordinary teamwork and sense of affiliation.

Just look at what Zappos have achieved. Check out their YouTube channel to find out why people love working there so much - and that will help you to understand why they achieve so much customer success.

A Flywheel is a mechanical device with a significant moment of inertia used as a storage device for rotational energy. Flywheels resist changes in their rotational speed, which helps steady the rotation of the shaft when a fluctuating torque is exerted on it by its power source such as that caused by a piston-based (reciprocating) engine, or when an intermittent load, such as the motion of a piston pump, is placed on it.

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Rohini Contractor: It’s time to do something for nothing

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:14:40 GMT

When Rohini Contractor looked at the impact of mobile on the customer experience she highlighted the importance of trust in attracting customers to a brand. Personal recommendations online and offline build trust.

The success of sites like www.tripadvisor.com shows how consumers will make purchase decisions based on the recommendations of people they don’t know because they would rather trust an individual than a brand. But there is something else at work here. Forrester calls it "benevolence", i.e. the willingness of people to give something without expecting something in return. People post on Tripadvisor, not for some kind of reward but because they know it will help other people like them – and encourage others to make context-rich reviews available for the benefit of all.

It’s this incentive-free action that builds trust. The trouble is that most organisations baulk at giving things away free. It is counter-intuitive for commercial organisations.

In my opinion it is the secret to success in today’s Recommendation Generation. What could your organisation give away to help earn the trust of target customers?

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The Millar Method: Emotional commitment from employees starts with management

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:07:53 GMT

When exploring the secrets of employee engagement, Guy Millar, founder of The Millar Method, raised the importance of securing emotional commitment from employees.

In my view this is a management responsibility and is driven by the business processes that are built-in to an organisation. For example, our work in employee engagement shows that employees really care about their career. They want to understand how they can develop and how their current role will help them to do so.

If management pays lip service to career development processes and doesn’t give time and attention to building a personal framework for each and every employee, why should the employee be committed to giving their all to the business?

Equally, processes like the Bell Curve, which apparently make sense financially (but in my opinion falls into the bad profits category), fail to recognise the contribution of employees that go above and beyond what is expected. If you’ve given your all but are told this only ranks as ‘meets expectations’ just to fit a statistical model, would you want to keep trying?

If organisations really want to build an excellent customer experience they first need to build an excellent employee experience. What is your company doing to build emotional commitment?

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Ralph Hababou: Customers ARE your best consultants and salespeople

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:02:52 GMT

Ralph Hababou – author of Service Gagnant, the secrets of companies that make a difference – gave possibly the best piece of advice of the Net Promoter Conference. Recognise that your customers are both your best consultants and your best salespeople.

The old adage, ‘the customer knows best’ is often linked to a bad tempered customer and a poor service experience. In fact, as Ralph indicates, it should be linked to product and service innovation. Customers know what they want. The trouble is that most organisations rarely ask them this vital question – or perhaps, more accurately - rarely ask enough customers this vital question.

In the online connected world that we live in, it is now possible to have direct to customer contact with thousands of customers. If you bring your customers into the inside of your business and treat them as advisors, you will be able to fully understand what they want and you will be able to activate a word of mouth machine that will drive sales.

This is summed up in the recent article entitled: "Giving customers what they want – the key to the customer engagement revolution."

What do you do to listen to your customers?

Bupa International: Make use of your most powerful Promoters - The one who where smiling

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 12:53:14 GMT

When Muriel MacCallum joined Bupa International as Customer Strategy and Marketing Director in January 2011, she noticed immediately that their Net Promoter Programme needed to be re-energised and that there was a need to focus on customer centricity. Fortunately Adrian Robins, Business Account and Company Support Team Manager, came with an awesome idea to WOW their customers.

They empowered their support with the possibility and budget to surprise people who really need it. For example they sent a book to someone which was seriously ill for a long time. Just this simple gesture meant that not only he but also his family became immediately a promoter of Bupa and in particular the support agent. By engaging everyone to put a smile on their customers face they are whipping their customers all over the world into promoters.

Key learnings from their case are:

Continious tracking instead of once a year with the result that they have daily data
They make use of a relationship survey 2 months prior to renewal. This is called Event Driven Marketing and the perfect way to close the loop with the customer
Shift from inbound to outbound calls
The side effect of surprising the customer is that the feedback of the customers creates employee engagement.

Overall I would say that if you would like to re-energise your programme, focus not only on the engineering of it, but focus on the human interaction with customers and your employee engagement to the programme. I wish you a lot of succes with re-energising your Net Promoter Programme.

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Experian: Re-energising Your Net Promoter Programme

info@netpromoter.com — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 21:32:39 GMT

What to do when Customer Loyalty becomes business as usual

A lot of companies start measuring customer loyalty by adding the ulimate question to their customer satifaction survey. When they notice that this metric is indeed a much better metric they often start redesigning their survey. Next to that we all learned that the closed loop to the customer is one of the most important thing. How could this be done when we only measure once a year? Dr. Kit Skov Hagemann of Experian leads us to the process they went through to re-energise their Net Promoter Programme.

They did the Net Promoter 360 view assement with Satmetrix, with the following outcome:

Restructure the loyalty programme
Re-engineer the survey & scope
Re-invigorate the loyalty buzz

They started immediately with in-depth investigation by using touch-point mapping. With the outcome that the support desk needed to be re-organised. They increased the frontline engagment through CRM and personalised their organisational communication.

The key learnings which can be extracted from their case are:

Get your frontline people engaged
Ensure people skills match development stage
Do not over engineer, keep it stupid simple (KISS) and make it practical

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Fred Reichheld: Q&A session

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:45:37 GMT

Fred starts by talking about the new book, The Ultimate Question 2.0. The key focus of the new book is that NPS is no longer Net Promoter Score but the Net Promoter System. Although the fundamentals have not changed, Net Promoter is definitely no longer just a metric. Just a quick overview before we move into the Q&A section of Fred's session...

Net Promoter System is

Employee + Customer. Building the momentum of the Flywheel by creating employee promoters and customer promoters.
Build around this the concepts of Mission, Leadership and Culture.
And ensure that you have a true:
- Employee Strategy
- Customer Strategy
- Link to Economics
- Closed Loop Follow-Up
- Innovation and Differentiation
- Technical/IT Enablers

Net Promoter Adoption

About 35% of companies have probably adopted NPS as a metric
Maybe 5% have adopted it as a true discipline

Thank you so much to everyone who sent in questions for Fred. We're filming the session and will be sharing detail as we had a lot of questions coming in from people who weren't able to attend. Watch this space!

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VocaLink: Corporate Social Responsibility Meets NPS

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 13:33:19 GMT

I have been looking forward to Mark Chapman's presentation since I first heard that he would be presenting on the link between Net Promoter and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Mark is the Director of Commercial Marketing and Chairman of the CSR committee at VocaLink. I was not disappointed.

90 million payments per day - that's what VocaLink are processing. That is the same volume as the number of tweets that go through Twitter each day. They have a long history but it was only in 2008 that they adopted a fully defined customer program. The Net Promoter discipline was adopted after a pilot with Satmetrix and helped VocaLink to define their Customer Promise. The NPS from the pilot was -21% - a score not out of kilter with a lot of organisations that are sitting in the Financial Services industry. But not good enough for VocaLink...

Across the first year, in their Cards business for example, they moved the NPS score from -21% to +6%.

Part of moving the organisation forward was to understand what is VocaLink's single driving principle. They have worked with the consultant, Robert Bean, to distil this into a concept that was meaningful for employees and customers alike. This has been captured in...

New Values - Spirited, Smart, Reliable
New Strapline - Safer Payments Smarter Partner

Part of the change has been to move from thinking about a Customer Program and Promise to a Partner Program and Promise.

And by the end of year 2, NPS overall had increased by over 16 percentage points and the score for Cards had shifted upwards again - to over +20%.

But the next step was to look at how the Partner Promise and the Net Promoter discipline could be incorporated into other areas of the organisation and the ethics and credo of the organisation.

First of all, they focused on internal communications. It was key that the whole organisation understood and had bought into the new direction, the corporate goals and were energised and motivated by it. Secondly, they then started to look at their external communications with clients and partners - and held an event for 20 key companies. NPS from those companies leapt from a single digit number to over 50% NPS.

For Mark, the next challenge was to make the link to CSR. CSR is an integral part of the brand. To sum up the concept of why CSR should be an area of focus and importance, Mark shared a quote from Porter & Kramer in the HBR: "[CSR is] creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges."

Mark took us on an emotional video journey of the areas where VocaLink is actively working within the community to show care and a true sense of responsibility. They do a lot of work and sponsorship with children and young adults, funding a wide variety of arts projects, sports events, learning and development activities. They may even have discovered the next Jackson Pollack! For me, the mencap projects are especially moving... Did you know that VocaLink have sponsored the youngest British woman to climb Everest? Or that they have sponsored SailMike to be the youngest round the world sailor?

So do they really do this out of the goodness of their hearts? That is certainly part of it - but VocaLink is a shrewd company. From the Everest climb sponsorship alone, additional media coverage has provided an equivalent of £1.5 million in advertising spend.

Another indirect impact has been on NPS. Where they are connecting their CSR focus with clients and partners - whether this has been done deliberately or not - VocaLink are seeing that their NPS is improving. For example:

Client X - started with a Recommend score of 5. Lots of taking action and focusing on closing the loop with the client raised that number in a year to an "8". Following a big CSR initiative, that score is a perfect 10.

Think laterally - think CSR - and you will also see the benefits for your organisation. And thank you to Mark - for an inspiring and emotive session. And yes - I did get a little misty at the video!

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