Jeanne Bliss, Net Promoter blogger and author of Chief Customer Officer, and John Abraham, General Manager of Net Promoter Programs for Satmetrix, chaired a discussion session driven by questions from the audience largely focused on program implementation issues. For those who missed the session you missed the opportunity for free books!   

An early question kicked off the discussion (and the first book give away) related to top management commitment. The case was presented of a committed top management but a somewhat confused middle management. Jeanne made the case that if top management is really committed they will change incentives for middle management. Middle management will be caught in the middle if the NPS program is a top management and front line philosophy without a complete look how it changes cost and operations.

One participant questioned why there was not a greater focus on employees. How do employees fit into an equation dominated by NPS measurement and operational improvement? While Jeanne gave examples of companies that built branding around "being a good place to work," a process for how you build employee engagement into an NPS program was not addressed. However, earlier in the discussion Jeanne had talked about getting front line employees connected to the CEO and top execs and had discussed the importance of closing the loop with the front line to build confidence that change was happening as a result of their input. In my earlier coverage of TD Canada, we did discuss how recommendation of TD as a good place to work correlated with the branch banks' ability to deliver a great customer experience. 

Jeanne discussed the importance of creating a cultural environment where "it's good to work together" in order to lay the foundation for an effective environment that focuses on customer value. Come to agreement on the stages of customer experience. Discuss how does the customer feel at each stage. Prioritize moments of truth for the customer in order to create organizational focus.

The session demonstrated a growing appetite for interactive discussion on the down to earth issues around building NPS programs.

In the session by Larry Hyett, Vice President, Retail Sales & Customer Experience, TD Canada Trust, we learned TD Canada Trust bets its brand on being "the better bet" for customers and has a significant history of measuring likely to recommend. The TD story is clearly one of making loyalty and recommendation an operational and management issue for a large diverse organization. There are over 1000 branches in Canada within a broader organization of 50,000 employees.

While likely to recommend has been measured for 10 years, NPS as an operational measure made visible to managers was put in place at the beginning of  2006 with over 300,000 customer interviews per year (done by phone). In addition, TD measures employee likely to recommend TD as a place to work. A note here is that TD uses a 5 point verbal measure (Extremely Likely, Likely, etc). The reason for adopting a 5 point score is largely historical.

TD reports a rather thorough and complete commitment to driving the brand value with full top management support. For example, front line employees rate the back office operations on their ability to deliver a customer centric experience. The "moments of truth" from all this are that every employee can make a difference in delivering a superior customer experience. In fact, TD seeks and rewards customer stories that demonstrate how branches are creating memorable (positive) customer experiences. These stories are often the basis for word of mouth sharing from customers to their friends and relatives. In response to a question on the correlation between employee likely to recommend working to TD to the customer score for a branch ii was not surprising to find that branches with happy employees had happy customers.

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