Four Seasons: Impeccable. Deluxe. Personal. In Touch.

Those are words that loyal guests use on a regular basis to describe the Four Seasons. All hotels experience glitches. The water gets turned off, the fire alarm accidentally goes off at 2:00 am, light bulbs burn out, shower curtains fall down. At Four Seasons, they are crazy devoted to glitches. Employees report each and every one and they are rigorously monitored to make sure they are resolved in a timely manner. Ahhhh... sounds lovely.

Deborah Carlisle, Manager of Marketing Planning for 74 Four Seasons in 31 countries, has the best job. She sells experience. By listening to their loyal customers they are able to distinguish themselves among a very competitive market. Hotels are always in danger of becoming a commodity. Websites like Hotels.com perpetuate that. The Ritz Carlton, Hotel Intercontinental, and Four Seasons are all within $100 in their price range for a standard room. Word-of-mouth among the high end business traveler is especially valuable. And Four Seasons gets that.

Ricardo Acevedo, General Manager for the Miami Four Seasons knows the secret sauce in their culture is the people. Can you imagine that every position you have open in your company must go through a minimum of 5 interviews? Every job candidate from the maids to management eventually will be interviewed by Ricardo. He is the final test, and uses his intuition and sense of humor to see if they are Four Seasons material. "If I can't make them smile, they are probably not a good fit" explains Ricardo.

Dignity.

"I will not allow a manager to mistreat employees. If they do, they will be dismissed," Ricardo said emphatically.

Dignity can come in the form of a free meal, clean pressed uniforms that fit nicely and are fashionable, and an employee locker room complete with a hot shower. These are not just employee perks; in some countries these are luxuries that provide dignity and instill pride. It's nice to hear of a North American company that doesn't take advantage of the work pool in less developed nations.

Employees are asked to rank their feelings towards Four Seasons in an annual survey.

#1 - I am proud to work for Four Seasons

#2 - I have a feeling of loyalty towards Four Seasons

#3 - Our guests are very happy with the quality they receive.

Fred Reichheld was in the room during this presentation. Throughout the conference, he reminded just how simple and how hard it is to grow a business. You have to treat people so well, that they'll come back and bring their friends and family.

The Golden Rule is truly ingrained in the Four Seasons culture. Can you say the same of yours?

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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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It's not just a noise a dog might make, it's a consumer ranking website of everything you'd find in your local yellow pages. In San Francisco, if you search for credit unions, you will find San Francisco Fire Credit Union's loyal members. They are the highest rated financial institution in one of the noisiest markets in the US. This is not a ranking you can buy, you have to earn it. Every single day.

Diana Dykstra is the CEO of San Francisco Fire Credit Union and a self-proclaimed Net Promoter Score zealot. She HATES satisfaction surveys. Why? Because when she took over as CEO, her credit union had a 98% satisfaction rate. But she knew, just from interacting with employees and members that they were not "delighted."

So that became her goal. To delight her members. Banking is an errand. You get in, get out, nobody gets hurt. Members are satisfied. But it doesn't have to be that way. One of the first questions she asked, was of her staff. Would THEY recommend SF Fire as an employer? "Our employees ARE our business" said Diana. "If they are detractors, we breed detractors." Her first round of internal NPS yielded a dismal -19.5%. Within three years she was able to turn that score around to 64.39% today, which she admits, is still too low. "Leaders would NEVER tolerate a large gap between forecast and actual financial performance but seem to look the other way when service gaps exist" explained Diana. She knew that she had to build a culture where service was the responsibility of the entire organization, not just the front-line.

To show that she was serious about service, she added her face and email access 24/7 to her on the front page of her website. Diana admits it has created a true addiction to her Blackberry. If a member wants to "Ask Diana" anything, DIANA responds as quickly as humanly possible. She shared stories of calling members on Sunday morning and helping folks as far away as Africa when their debit cards weren't working. By focusing on team, listening, learning and innovating and more importantly recognizing they are not in the banking business - but the E-lationship business - they are proud to say their member NPS has risen from 52% to 74% in just three years. Her BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) for 2010 is to outrank USAA at 85%. One way she has decided to elate members is to eliminate all fees (except bad behavior fees).

"Members don't like fees" she explains. "If they've been doing business with us and want travelers checks or a notary, I'm not going to charge them." She also recognized that with two branches, she would never be perceived as convenient to most members, so they took the bold step to rebate all ATM surcharges for members. Extreme service is now a core competency of SF Fire Credit Union, not just a function. She's whittling away at the "brick" of policies, procedures, rules, regulations and compliance that used to drive her culture and has a goal to have employee's so engaged in elating that her employee handbook will be one statement:

"Just do the right thing."

That's a WOW!

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For the opening session on day 2, Enrique Salem, COO of Symantec, joined Richard Owen, CEO of Satmetrix, for a candid one-on-one chat on how Symantec is using Net Promoter to measure customer loyalty, drive operational improvements, and empower employees throughout the company. When introducing Enrique, Richard noted that Symantec, a global leader in infrastructure software, is an early adopter of Net Promoter and has focused on the discipline to guide strategy through tremendous growth periods, including the largest software acquisition in history.

For Enrique and all of Symantec, creating customer loyalty is a top priority. Enrique pointed out that to be successful with Net Promoter, you must put in place the processes to drive or change internal behaviors that center on the customer. Therefore, every employee has to understand their role to deliver a great experience and increase customer loyalty.

Enrique said that Symantec takes Net Promoter and customer loyalty very seriously. At the executive level the team is very involved with Net Promoter. The CEO gets together with his leadership team to review customer loyalty metrics and look for ways to improve on the processes that drive loyalty. The leadership team continues this by meeting regularly to review the Net Promoter dashboard that monitors key customer loyalty drivers. For Enrique and Symantec, Net Promoter is not just a score, it's about taking action across the enterprise, looking at driving behavior, and linking it to the economics of the business.

Symantec implements its Net Promoter practice on a global scale and segments across product lines and versions.  And they've learned some key things in the process. For worldwide implementation they segment by regions because different cultures rate loyalty scores differently. For example, in general Latin America tends to give high scores where Japan tends to give the lowest scores. To keep the results as meaningful as possible scores are looked at by region. For products, Net Promoter scores are looked at for each product release so they can see specifically how each release is doing relative to expectations.

At the end of the session Enrique said that he believes Net Promoter is a clear indicator of how the business will perform in the future because it measures long-term customer value. He also reminded the audience that to be successful you need to create a closed--loop feedback system where you listen to the voice of the customer and take action.

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Deb Eastman, Chief Marketing Officer of Satmetrix, covered how managers can design a Net Promoter Score (NPS) program for action Friday afternoon. The well attended session included B to B and B to C Net Promoter practitioners from a wide variety of industries, including Financial Services, Business Advisory Services, and Telecommunications. In her ebullient style, Deb captured the attention of this audience, focusing on the topic of driving action at all levels within an organization.

She identified three levels of action taken within an organization to improve the customer experience, and that all three must be present to take full advantage of the NPS program. These are:

1. Executive Team: Executives are required to identify and support changes to strategy that will have an important impact on the customer experience. Executive leadership makes such changes possible.
2. Management: Managers must be involved in the process of optimizing the performance of their people and processes to enhance the customer experience. Managers also are involved in the role of monitoring and coach groups to improve overall performance of individuals.
3. Customer Facing Roles: Customer facing employees, whether sales, service, or support teams, must be given direct customer feedback about their individual performance.

Executive Team

The Executive Leadership will review customer feedback about the overall customer and identify the key areas for improvement or differentiation. Specific initiatives can be identified which will make important improvements to all customers, or to large customer segments. These initiatives are typically identified and discussed in annual, or bi-annual customer experience meetings where analysis and recommendations are presented from an accumulation of NPS and other Customer Touchpoint data.

For example, BT InfoNet identified that their implementation process showed room for improvement. By improving the initial customer installation process, overall growth of the company exceeded double-digits, which outpaced their industry.

Management

Managers are responsible for monitoring the NPS results of their teams, identifing best practices among top achievers, and coaching low performers. Many organizations utilize a system of real time dashboards, that can be configured for each manager's role and scope. These dashboards typically integrate customer feedback information with other operational Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Deb gave the example of how Experian was able to double their NPS and achieve double digit revenue growth by providing Department and Sales Leaders with dashboards of results and the ability to make and track action plans.

Customer Facing Roles

Deb discussed how providing Customer facing teams with real time customer feedback enables these employees to change their behaviors and deliver an improved customer experience. Closed loop follow up processes also provide the front line with the ability to solve the issues of detractors. These are the fastest improvements any company can make to their NPS, as your teams are interacting with customers every day.

Companies such as Sodexho have been able to improve client retention rates by 46% through closed loop action plans that involve the front line. Client retention is hugely important to many firms with high customer acquisition costs or long contract cycle times.

Questions about this blog can be sent to Paul Pakalnietis by emailing to: paulp@satmetrix.com.

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Vivian Hairston Blade, Master Black Belt -- Marketing at GE Consumer & Industrial, gave a lively presentation on the GE experience with Net Promoter and leveraging Six Sigma and LEAN to improve the customer experience. In summary, GE leverages customer insights to identify unnecessary and non-value add processes and touchpoint experiences, and applies LEAN to attack the "waste" -- which results in improvements to internal processes and customer loyalty.

Vivian kicked things off by providing an overview of GE's commitment to NPS as an enterprise initiative. NPS is central to their objective of promoting organic growth, and it is the discipline used in both B2B and B2C business units. As a short video demonstrated, NPS "makes GE listen to customer cues" to identify where change is needed, and business units strive to build promoters and hear positive testimonials from their customer base. At GE, the focus is not on managing to a score, but rather to continuously improve the experience.

Vivian introduced GE's simple and straightforward "listen, act and measure" framework for customer experience management.

"Listen" entails

• Capturing both "experience" and "expectation" attributes around the brand and core product performance
• Identifying key differentiating aspects of the experience and make changes that really WOW the customer
• Follow up: close the loop with customers by acknowledging their feedback and listening for clues to root causes
• Segment customers -- understand how they differ in their business models and interactions, and ensure these segments are included in your NPS analysis

"Act" includes:

• Taking both tactical and strategic action: tactical includes critical feedback that you need to close loop with customer quickly; while strategic involves identifying "what's broken" and prioritizing change
• Apply LEAN Six sigma to enable continuous improvement.  Through LEAN, you identify unnecessary and non-value add activities, and remove the waste! Focusing only on what truly impacts the customer

A short video provided an example of LEAN in action: for GE Money, the process for enrolling new dealers previously took 63 days! An analysis of the process showed numerous inefficiencies, such as paper based processes and manual hand offs, and only 2 ¾ hours of actual value add work involved! The enrollment process was a drag on revenue and a source of frustration for dealers.  GE leveraged its Voice of Customer data to make dramatic improvements. GE automates the process, including online forms and even redesigning the office layout of the applications department. They also improved the usability of their dealer set up kit, which helped get new dealers up and running faster.

Not only is the experience better, but speeding up enrollments increased transactions (sales) by over 20%.

"Measure" includes capturing the customer-facing metrics that matter to help GE "realize the growth." Customer metrics include NPS, quality, transaction time, etc. By identifying the key moments of truth in the customer lifecycle, cost to serve goes down, referrals go up, as well as improved sales, referrals and repeat purchases. This was illustrated in a closing video showing GE Commercial and Industrial leveraging LEAN to map out current processes in order to identify and attack the waste.

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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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