How do you grow at double the rate of your industry with a $0 Marketing spend? Diana Dykstra, CEO of the San Francisco Fire Credit Union, shared her story of driving growth through a focus on customer loyalty and employee engagement.

The underlying theme was a fundamental belief that "people are good" — front-line employees want to do the right thing and management's job is to empower them to delight the customer.  Ms. Dykstra talked about the measures implemented at the credit union that allow and reward employees for going above and beyond to address customer needs. It's this culture of customer-focus that has resulted in the impressive Word-of-Mouth results.

Another ingredient of success was an understanding of loyalty drivers — in this case convenience — and making investment decisions using NPS results. For example, instead of investing in branch offices at an estimated annual cost of $500K - $750K, the credit union decided to waive ATM fees no matter where the customer withdrew funds. The result was that customers received the "convenience" factor for a much reduced investment. Other examples include providing all customers pre-approved loans at any time, eliminating the traditional direct marketing campaign, i.e., junk mail, and eliminating bad profits — non-punitive fees.

This was a dynamic presentation and inspirational message about unleashing the creativity of the front-line and creating a working environment where customer delight is top priority — with impressive business results.

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Peggy Kurusz and Mary Ellen Griffin of Ascension Health, the nation's largest Catholic nonprofit health system, discussed how NPS is used by their organization to focus attention on the patient experience. Specifically, the presentation described how St. Joseph Hospital, one of the top performing member hospitals, uses the Adaptive Design technique to drive process improvements.

The challenge - increase the time nurses spend with patients. Ascension Health found that on average, only 20 minutes of every hour were spent on patient care while the majority of time was consumed by administrative and teaching activities.

The Adaptive Design technique was modeled on Toyota's production line process improvement methodology. It is different from other approaches because it focuses on problem solving at the front-line. It involves watching a process, understanding triggers and interactions, and engaging the front-line to determine root cause and potential improvements.

As an example, Mary Ellen talked about the re-stocking process that was too complex for new employees, caused nurses to hunt for supplies, and generated inventory inefficiencies. Using Adaptive Design, the team eliminated inventory outages and reduced total time spent re-stocking by 50%.  Additional benefit -- increased nursing time for patients.

The key takeaway for me was the importance of really understanding the impact to patients and front-line workers of poor processes -- the concept of "humble learning" and engaging the front-line in problem-solving. Front-line employee engagement and linkage to customer loyalty is a theme that was prevalent in many of the Miami Net Promoter Conference presentations.

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