Vivian Blade, a Master Black Belt, shared her experiences in using NPS to drive loyalty at GE. Jeff Immelt, GE's CEO, is driving NPS from the top down. It makes life a lot easier in terms of driving the program. A viable business needs organic growth... and NPS supports this by showing if you are growing your base of loyal customers. GE thinks of NPS and Lean Six Sigma complementary to driving growth.
NPS works across B2C and B2B as well as to provide product and process insights. Key point... NPS is not about managing the score... it IS about how we improve customers' experiences. GE uses a simple framework for listening, acting and measuring in order to drive growth.
Listen for the survey process: Vivian thinks segmentation is very key. This segmentation needs to line up to corporate objectives. It is very important to do root cause analysis and involve the leaders in those call backs. You will get important experience cues and product cues from the feedback. From that, you will know what defects you will need to eliminate for. But more, you will get some pointers on the *wow* factor or what will differentiate you.
Act: Using Lean Sigma, you have two buckets.
1) Tactical — action plan by customer 3-6 month followup
2) Strategic — systemic fixes... use Lean to improve customer facing processes.
Lean Six Sigma can be used in any function...if there is an output; there is a process, so Lean Six Sigma will work!
Lean attacks waste by reducing cycle time. Six Sigma attacks defect reduction and variation. Some analysis of process time shows that about 95% of time in a process is NON-value add! So, lots of waste in what we do! Vivian showed eight categories of waste... some were surprising, such as unrealized creativity. Vivian mentioned the previous session's discussion of Adaptive Design at St Joseph's Hospital. This embodies many of Lean's ideas... focus on the process and eliminate waste, and start from the customer (or patient) in.
Vivian showed how GE Money used Lean to figure out why it took a dealer 63 days to transact with GE! They got the process down to 1 day by figuring out what was causing the delays and completely revamping everything in the process.
Measure: It is important to measure the results of your actions against key customer metrics.
So the key message is look at your customers' experiences and moments of truth and figure out what you need to do to meet and exceed their expectations. It is also key to get this into the DNA of a company to make it sustainable. This requires accountability and making sure you reward the right behavior. I thought this was a really interesting session as it showed real-life applications of both NPS and Lean principles.
Coming from a company that does not have a Six Sigma practice, I wondered how at least it might be possible to use the Lean method to look at our processes and eliminate waste. This might be the best way to truly improve our customers' experiences for the long haul.
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