Net Promoter Community

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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Phil Clement, CMO of Aon Corporation, had an interesting story based on his company's NPS program. It shows how you can scale a program around gathering NPS and drive it down into the operational level. Aon has 43,000 employees out of 425 acquisitions! Companies that grow through acquisition have some challenges: they buy versus recruit talent and buy vs home grow products.

Aon has grown to be number 1 in size, but more importantly, customers rate Aon number 1. Phil showed a comparative chart that showed Aon's growth and NPS. Aon's growth and stock price are above its peers. "It helps our clients or helps our people help our clients" is the Aon mantra.

All Aon people and processes need to focus on customers. Aon uses NPS to help them to do the right thing - to help cut through the anecdotes and understand the issues so they can be fixed. The goal is to drive organic growth - from trust and credibility with clients.

Aon uses a 5-step process:

1. Local market planning
2. Client focused marketing
3. Revenue management
4. Increase client facing presence
5. Product development and innovation

Aon picked NPS because they felt it was proven. They do it via an online survey. Aon also uses client advisory groups, third party partnerships, win/loss analysis, client surveys as well. They want to get participation in the NPS survey to 95%. Getting scores to field stirred some angst about what to do next... where to get time and what to do. The team helped by providing 3 strategies for detractors, passives, and promoters. They do not filter on high or low margin clients.

Doing this globally presents some challenges; e.g., Germany. Its labor and privacy laws create some hurdles, but if you focus on what the purpose is, you can overcome them. Accountability rests with Country Manager and rolls up to a region. On embedding this into the Aon culture, Aon is driving up its participation in the survey from 17%. They just did a pilot that got participation up to 75%. It requires the Regional Managing Director to own it. They reward high participation.

It was a great story. The punch line is that in 2 years Aon has gone from not having a system to having one that is embedded in their culture globally. This is no mean feat given the scale of their offices and employee base, as well as complex operations resulting from acquisitions. Well done Aon!

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