Miami Conference Blog 2011

Ingenix - Action Planning That's The Real Deal

info@netpromoter.com — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 12:20:18 GMT

ACTION PLANNING THAT'S THE REAL DEAL – COMMITMENT, ACCOUNTABILITY, EXECUTION, RESULTS!
by Angela Bailey, Vice President, Marketing Operations, and Kathy Sotak, Client Loyalty Program Director, Ingenix

The second presentation in our Track was from Ingenix.

The Company:

- A global leader in health information technology and services throughout the health care system
- Key market-facing brands include i3, Ingenix Consulting, and The Lewin Group
- Headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minnesota
- Annual revenue of more than $1.8 billion as of 2009
- More than 11,000 employees in 40 countries

The Catalyst:

Rapid growth over a period of fifteen years through combination of acquisitions and organic growth resulted in Ingenix lauching of their Client Loyalty Program in 2008.

As is often the case, the need to incorporate the voice-of-the-customer into decison-making in a structured way was addressed through NPS.

If you fast-forward to today, their results have been very impressive:

1) Cross-functional Team have completed over 50 systemic Root-Cause Action Plans

2) NPS has increased 13 points since launch.

3) 2/3 of Survey Questions have increased significantly since launch.

4) In the past 12 months, 100 clients have been moved up one rung of the loyalty ladder.

Ingenix Client Engagement Model has nine key areas:

1) Creating Trustworthy Data - Prior to any surveys being deployed, client segmentation was done (voice according to value).

2) Closed Loop Follow up - This is conducted within 48 hours for Detractors and within 7 days for

Promoters.

3) Survey Wave Planning - There are two surveys waves per year.

4) Results Analysis - Results are delivered 4-5 weeks after the survey and are both Coporate-wide as well as Drilldowns.

5) Action Planning and Continuous Improvement - Angela and Kathy went on to elaborate on this area which I will cover below.

6) Innovation - Ingenix is always on the look out for systemic issues that can be corrected to Wow! their clients.

7) Business Development - Look for opportunities within the existing Client base

8) Ongoing Client Communications - External Communication

9) Internal Education on results and impact - Internal Commununication

Action Planning and Continuous Improvement:

Ingenix breaks their action planning into two types:

1) Client-Level Action Plans

Account Teams are given NPS Summaries, Account influence charts, Client comments and other documentation for the Client Managers.

Ingenix then highlighted a success story in which detractors comments like "...support lacking..." and "...response times terrible..." mobilized their team to develop tactical plans that addressed the clients needs and began an ongoing relationship that has resulted in US$7MM in new revenue.

2) Systemic Root-cause Action Plans - which they referred to as "things you can't fix with a phone call" had three main characteristics:

- The Program Team facilitates these sesssions which allows them to ask certain questions that internal departmental team might not be able to ask in front of peers, supervisors, etc

- The Program Team provides drilldown analysis and verbatims ahead of the meeting in order to prepare participants for the brainstorming sessions

- At the end of these sessions a draft action plan (with owners and goal dates) is assigned in session (not after).

Tools used in these sessions include Fishbone diagrams, 5 Why's, Process Mapping and an Action Planning template which I urge everyone to have a look at. These presentations will be available here at Netpromoter.com shortly.

Key Take-Aways

1) Executive Buy-In and Support is critical. If your Executives are not prioritizing these Action Plans and helping to remove barriers, they will typically not get done. If you find yourself in this scenario, it's time to step back and resell the Program to your Leadership.

2) Guide your business stakeholders through the Action Planning Process. Enable your Teams with the right tools, templates and meeting structures to get them from survey results to action plans.

3) Execute. "Action plans are meaningless until they are owned and executed."

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tw Telecom - Debunking the "My Contribution Doesn't Matter" Myth

info@netpromoter.com — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 12:13:54 GMT

The final presentation in our Track was a great tactical case study titled DEBUNKING THE "MY CONTRIBUTION DOESN'T MATTER" MYTH – THE CONNECTION BETWEEN EMPLOYEE EMPOWERMENT AND CUSTOMER LOYALTY from tw Telecom.

The Company (from www.twtelecom.com):

"tw telecom, headquartered in Littleton, CO, is a leading provider of managed networking solutions to a wide array of businesses and organizations in 75 markets spanning 30 states and D.C. As one of the country's premier competitive service providers, tw telecom integrates data, dedicated Internet access, and local and long distance voice services for long distance carriers, wireless communications companies, incumbent local exchange carriers, and enterprise organizations in healthcare, finance, higher education, manufacturing, and hospitality industries, as well as for military, state and local government. We began our business in 1993 as a joint venture with Time Warner Cable (now a unit of Time Warner Inc.). Since 1997, we focused on delivering services to business customers, including carriers and governmental entities, and on expanding from dedicated services into Voice Services, Internet and data.

In July 1998, we became a separate entity apart from Time Warner Cable and were reorganized into Time Warner Telecom LLC. In May 1999, we issued an IPO and became Time Warner Telecom Inc.

In July 2008, Time Warner Telecom became tw telecom".

The Catalyst:

As we've heard a couple times already today, it was the inheriting of a culture (through aquisition) that would start tw Telecom down the path of pursuing their NPS Program in 2006.

Four key tactics have been deployed by tw Telecom:

1) Connecting Employees to Customer Loyalty:

The tw Telecom team determined that their key Loyalty Driving touchpoints were service delivery, maintenance, service inquiries and account management.

Drilling down deeper uncovered that frequent status updates of outstanding repair issues was more important to customers than overall repair time.

This was very interesting to me as we have found the exact same thing in many organizations. Although wait time is often an important service delivery attribute, most organizations simply don't have the ability to keep throwing dollars and resources at it. We were able to show a high correlation between 'staff keeping customers informed of delays' and an increase in NPS.

tw Telecome employees were then given the tools (systems, processes and goals) to be able to wrap their hands around and improve their own statusing score. In turn, Satisfaction and NPS went up. This is is a classic example of focusing on lead measures (as Franklin Covey call them.) Lead measures need to be both predictive (of you move them, your overall score or nps will move) and influencable (the staff can do something about them). This showed the staff how much power they actually do have and also illustrated a straight line for them to improve NPS and Customer Loyalty.

2) Distributing Feedback broadly across the organization

Online dashboard are delivering real-time feedback to managers in each department or specific role within the company. These dashboards are complemented with Automated alerts that are pushed to

front-line employees. Giving employees access to the real-time info that they need to see in formats that are used to working in is the real key here.

Educating Employees and Evangelizing the Customer Experience

There is a specific Intranet site that provide employees with the tools and information to help them deliver

the intended customer experience. There are sections on voice-of-the-customer, job descriptions,etc.

Internal Customer Experience and Voice-of-the-Customer Training modules have been recently rolled out and have been very successful. All departments are trained to leverage tw Telecom's success in their Customer initiatives.

4) Harnessing the Voice of the Employee.

This is a tool that allows any employee who has interacted with a customer to generate an alert to the account team to follow-up with a particular customers issue. For example if someone in billing is speaking to a customer who is upset about any aspect of doing busines with tw Telecom or is shopping around, they can let the Account Team know immediately so they can take action. This internal escalation and routing mechanism is proving to be a very powerful customer retention tool.

Stephanie and Lara shared some great ideas for us today when it come to focusing on your customers by really focusing on your employees.

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Medtronic Diabetes - How Creating Customer-First Culture Sets You Up For Success

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 22:00:08 GMT

The first presentation in our Track, 'When Changing Your Culture Is Key', was from Jeff Anglin of Medtronic Diabetes.

The Company (from www.medtronic.com):

"Our medical technologies help make it possible for millions of people to resume everyday activities, return to work, and live better, longer. We're able to do this with the help of some very special people around the world: 38,000 dedicated employees who share a passionate purpose to improve lives, thousands of medical professionals who share their insights and ideas, and hundreds of advocacy associations that help us share information so people with debilitating diseases know relief is possible."

The Catalyst:

An aquisition (and cultural differences between the two organizations) forced Medtronic to examine areas that were lacking when it came to staying close to the customer at all level of the organization.

We have found that this is often the case for many organizations. Inheriting cultures though acquistion will almost always test your ability to maintain a consistent customer experience.

The Journey:

Voice-of-the-customer Surveys soon after the acqusition uncovered some painful truths in this area and opened the eyes of leadership as to what was really going on from the customer perspective.

This led some major structural changes and the setting up of a cross-functional role ("The Customer Experience Czar") within the organization to address these concerns and figure how the entire company could get closer to the customer at all levels.

Key components of this include:

1) Properly disseminating the voice-of-the-customer throughout company.

2) Quarterly forums where customers are brought in to speak to all the managers of the organization about the good and bad aspects of service delivery.

3) "The Voice" is Medtronics internal quarterly newletter designed to keep the customer top-of-mind.

4) "Real life" Videos of their customers (patients who use insulin pumps) at their homes and in their workplace are also shown throughout the company to uncover inefficiencies and areas for product innovations. These videos are also shown to their suppliers so they also better understanding how their products are being used to improve the qulaity of people's lives.

Making The Connection:

It was critical that everyone in the organization understood their role around the customers. This was done right from the CEO down in his role in the Program. This included presenting NPS alongwith the company Financials.

Every department's (from IT to Accounting) role was mapped to how it impacted the customer.

Even basic, tactical items like email signatures were revamped to be more service oriented. Consistent messaging is another key to always keep the customer top-of-mind. Another tactic along these same line is having photos of customers in board and meeting rooms in order to consider the imnpacts on them when decisions are made.

Jeff also discussed that other metrics were examined that might be contradictory to this mission and might create a negative customer experience. This may seem like an obvious exercise but we have found that it is not done properly often enough.

All these powerful tactics were really put to the test when Medtronic was faced with a product recall. The entire Medtronic team rallied together and ensure that the decision around this diffult situation always kept the customer at the forefront.

This included:

1) Proactively sending out supplies that their customers would need.
2) Multi-channel interaction in order to best service the customers.
3) Special handling in certain cases in which customers needed their it.
4) And a Trust Letter of apology written by the President to all customers.

Jeff's passion for his NPS Program really shined through. We were very fortunate to kick-off our Tracks with Medtronic.

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Symantec - Who is the Right Customer?

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:47:06 GMT

Collecting customer feedback can be trickier than it sounds, as you navigate through decisions for sample selection, timing, frequency, numeric rating and open-ended questions, and so forth. Among your decision criteria, a frequent request of your stakeholders may be: "please interview the 'right' customers". But what do you mean? Do 'wrong' customers actually exist?

"Consider the potential career path and future role of each customer", advised Tracie Scott, Symantec's Director of Customer & Partner Insight & Measurement Architecture & Analytics. In her presentation at the 2011 Miami Net Promoter Conference, Laying the Cornerstone -- Tactical Approaches to Designing Your Program Architecture, Tracie explained that a balanced sample, with consistent demographics each time you survey, is more important than screening out respondents. For example, some stakeholders are reluctant to pay heed to customer feedback about older versions of a product, but Tracie reminds them about the rich opportunity that awaits them in learning from these customers' inputs, to eventually migrate them to successive revenue streams. My view: after all, when it comes to accepting customers' money when they make purchases, we're very open-minded -- this open-mindedness in ongoing management of customers is a key to customer centricity.

Repeat participation by customers is positively influenced when they see that your question set is about you helping them be more successful. Symantec has discovered that each page turn in a survey is a leaky pipe for survey abandonment, so they limit their survey to four pages containing only key drivers of Net Promoter, emphasizing customer-centric questions.

Open-ended questions may not be very useful at the aggregate level, but customer comments can be quite useful for the business units' efforts to make improvements, Tracie explained. She reminds stakeholders that customer feedback might not have scientific cause-and-effect characteristics, as human beings' behaviors and decisions are much more complex than that; customer opinions are an important input to running a business. Symantec uses the Satmetrix support site to conduct data analysis, segmenting their survey results to the individual stakeholder level, and enabling anyone company-wide to see their customer feedback charts, and add to the analysis according to their interests.

"Start with the end in mind", Tracie advises. Put more effort into executive sponsorship and stakeholder action planning, and be creative about solutions to your program management challenges. Know your gaps between current and desired skills, passions, and performance. Symantec makes strategic use of hard and soft skills from vendor partners and internal subject matter experts for many aspects of their program. They have a multi-year plan which they clearly communicate at every opportunity, and they maintain flexibility to adapt their plan as the business evolves. "Every program is like a snowflake; no two programs are alike", she says, in describing the adaptability of methodology decisions to fit specific business needs.

A fitting quote from Sun Tzu is: "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Remember the big picture as you design and refine your customer feedback methodology.

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Easy Access to Actionable Customer Insights

info@netpromoter.com — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 14:15:49 GMT

Imagine the power of pictorially summarizing your customer survey results so that stakeholders can understand possible customer experience improvements within 10 minutes! Reality Maps help your project teams learn about end-to-end customer experience and pain points in a storyboard format, with an eye toward future innovation.

"By using a Reality Map, our project team solved a systemic customer challenge in less than two months, with a huge impact on revenue", explained Kimberly Dunwoody, Director of Global Customer Experience Design Strategy at Western Union. In her Pioneering Customer Experience Design presentation at the 2011 Miami Net Promoter Conference, Kimberly said, "We use the Reality map as a global customer experience framework to consistently deploy improvements across all organization silos".

Reality Maps are built on four questions, after the Business Intelligence team conducts customer feedback data mining to identify high-priority improvement opportunities:

1) Why would this project benefit the customer?

2) What is going to be built?

3) How will the solution work for the customer?

4) What is the effectiveness against pre-established success metrics?

The first question identifies strategic impact, in terms of business results: fulfill a brand promise, reduce cost, and/or increase or protect revenue.
The second question determines scope: a storyboard brings substance to ideas for more thorough, yet quick, evaluation by project teams and executives.
The third question describes the solution's design in a process flow format.
The fourth question enables continual refinement, circling back to the desired business results as identified by the first question.

Reality Map

Mapping	Consideration	Evaluation	Purchase	Post-Purchase
Customer
Experience
Opportunity
Process

The Reality Map's rows (also known as "swim lanes" on a flow diagram) describe the customer's world, with emphasis on "moments of truth". Western Union defines a moment of truth as a step in the customer's process that could cause the customer to turn away and give their business to a competitor.

Steps and issues are listed in the Customer row.
An emoticon (smiley face icon) is used in the Experience row to indicate customers' satisfaction, neutrality, or dissatisfaction.
Impact on revenue, costs, and/or brand promise fulfillment is shown in the Opportunity row.
Business processes affecting the customer's steps and issues are shown in the Process row. By including the name of the vice president who owns each business process, the Reality Map is also an accountability tool that inspires a sense of urgency among project teams.

Western Union uses the Reality Map as the primary means to share customer feedback results throughout the company. "In place of thousands of pages of customer feedback data, we summarize our survey results on a 3x3-foot poster that takes only 10 minutes to explain to stakeholders", Kimberly says. "Reality Maps give employees easy access to customer insight, with highly visible accountability for improving customer experience."

What a powerful tool that solves so many challenges we all face in achieving high return-on-investment in customer feedback programs. This may be the most efficient method I've come across to sensitize employees company-wide regarding their impact on customer experience, and build results-oriented customer centricity throughout an organization.

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P is the most important letter in NPS

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 23:19:15 GMT

Up on stage we have an inspiring talk from Philip’s Arne Van de Wijdeven, Customer Experience Director for the electronics giant.

His message is simple and compelling – focus on Promoters not the Score.

Find the customers – and employees - who enthusiastically love you and recommend you – your Super Promoters, and listen, learn and leverage.

Sure, you need to resolve issues with your detractors, but by focusing resource on your promoters you open up an invaluable source of insight, develop a smart sounding board for innovation, and activate the best marketing resource you can get.

But most of all, a focus on Promoters humanizes the Net Promoter system.

Ultimately customer experience is about people not metrics – it’s about smiles not scores. Promotion is about emotion not closed loop systems. Your super promoters are passionate customers who have the power to energize, motivate and align internal teams behind a customer experience-led growth strategy. Harness them, treasure them and grow with them.

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Prescription for Change with Concentra - Think Retail in Healthcare!

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 22:37:55 GMT

A great presentation and discussion took place during the Miami Net Promoter Conference during the second session of the Innovation: Taking a New Approach track, Customer-Driven Innovation. An Innovative Prescription for Change – Thinking like a Retailer to Make Healthcare a More Positive Experience presented by Ted Bucknam from Concentra shared with the group how his company undertook a radical company transformation from the top-down that differentiated themselves from the marketplace and improved their customer and employee perceptions.

He summarized the efforts his organization undertook to a four stage process:

1) Research – Assess and review awareness and brand messaging and how it is perceived in the marketplace. He identified that it is important to pay attention to detail and identify key points of differentiation with the research.

His company identified a revised mission after reviewing the coffee industry and how some businesses identified that they change people’s life. He said, “We are in healthcare, should be doable for us!”

2) Company Change – They identified that they need to redesign and rewrite their mission, vision, logo, and corporate values. They found value in going through these exercises to ultimately decide on improving the patient experience to make it welcoming and respectful.

3) Infrastructure Change – It is important to ensure that you review and revise your processes and Concentra reviewed their service environment and service delivery. Enhancements they focused on was reviewing their hiring process, implementing a customer service hall of fame, developing transparent reporting to show various metrics about the customer and employees.

4) Cultural Change – it all starts with focusing on the internal communications to improve awareness, review knowledge and skills, and refocus messaging and the change. They developed an “Orange Book” (I want one!) that contains quotes from patients and colleagues that helped reinforce a common understanding of “what great looks like”. External communications followed to help share the new changes with customers.

Concentra now doesn’t focus on financials anymore and reviews the patient and colleague experience since in Ted’s opinion, “the finances follow as a result”. In sum, Dan left us with the message that when thinking about change in your business, “…It’s not compliance with a process change, but having the right mindset to change your culture.”

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Evolution & Innovation - In Sync @ Intuit

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 22:12:57 GMT

WOW! The first session of the Innovation: Taking a New Approach track, Customer-Driven Innovation – The Evolution of a Successful Product presented by Roy Rosin from Intuit was lively, entertaining, and full of interesting thoughts and stats! Some key ones include:

Innovation means the creation and capture of new value. I never heard it described that way before and it sounded so cool!

At Intuit, they have focused on innovating their products in a multitude of ways, whether by allowing for alternative payments, integrating with cell phone manufacturers, or starting their own debit card practice.

When it comes to innovation, they believe in following a mantra that is to change what you:

Measure
Make visible

When Intuit embarked on their new Health product line, they chose to focus on a niche market that needed an easier way to manage their medical and health bills from insurers and providers. Key steps that are followed:

Utilize Research to gain emotional engagement and promoter passion, not insight.
There is a need to have a narrow focus so you can be great for someone and get out to market fast
Test new ideas quickly at low costs
Make small bets rather than large ones so you don’t get caught off guard with a misguided bet and bad investment
Consider innovation from End to End across the customer experience so that it results in a differentiated result
Go broad…diverge quickly then focus narrowly so that your initiatives can consider big impact at first and then have pinpoint detailed attention upon execution

Intuit Health has seen their product change over time from a data entry system to an application that integrates information from other providers to eliminate data entry to being a universally accepted application for information capture.

I never knew that a swollen eyelid is known in the medical field as an “anterior blepharitis ” (what a mouthful)!

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Chick-fil-A: "I could eat there seven times a day..."

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 21:24:23 GMT

What a great musical opening from Tim Hawkins on video for the start of Dan Cathy's, COO and President of Chick-fil-A, opening. Check it out! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsJHqstPuNo

It was greatly enjoyed by the audience who laughed and applauded and appreciated the humour.

I've never seen Dan speak before, but I found his folksy style engaging and warm. This is a man who is passionate about his company and the delivery of an exceptional customer experience. There's no pretence, no preening, no strutting - just an "honest-to-goodness" belief in delivering a phenomenal experience.

Now, we can't all share Dan's personal beliefs that have driven his focus on customer experience, but we can respect and appreciate them...and the success that he has driven for his own family business.

Dan and the team have built their reputation around the concept that "a great name is better than great riches." Building reputation through exceptional service has been key throughout the development of the company and, more recently, through the implementation of their Net Promoter program.

Chick-fil-A also know how to have fun with their customers, as the Cows "Eat Mor Chikin" campaign proves. How long will Dan and the team continue the Cows concept? It's been running for 15 years! As Dan says himself, "we'll milk it til the cows come home!"

I enjoyed the idea that every customer has their own life story, that may not always be a positive one. To help drive employee behaviour at Chick-fil-A, they are introduced to this through an emotive video that makes them think about how offering a sincere smile, a helping hand, through their interaction in the restaurant can actually help to enrich another person's life. Sometimes its the small things that make the biggest difference. Or as Dan terms it, his employees are supporting the ministry of hospitality. Kindness and warmth is the cheapest, most frugal WOW in the world, the easiest to deliver and can provide the best response.

Create value through attitude; bring happiness through warmth; understand that human beings are social animals and positive human contact is ultimately what we desire. Delivering that contact will lead to happy customers who revisit again and again, and will drive the company growth.

Dan's now giving away a week of free chicken at the restaurant - and the winner is Paul from Waco, Texas!

And what a finale! Sitting at the back of the auditorium, I've just been treated to an early view of the Cows coming to Conference! Yep, standing right next to me are the Chick-fil-A cows!

1...2...3...And they're off!

The cows are galloping through the room! It's a beefy stampede! You just "heifer" see this to believe this. Honestly, I'm not talking "bull"!!! The audience is in an uproar of hilarity! The Chick-fil-A team are handing out "COWS"!

It's a riotous ending to the 2011 Miami Net Promoter Conference...and possibly the best finale to date!

Fred and the Frugal WOW!

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 20:42:27 GMT

Fred Reichheld, author of The Ultimate Question, started off by celebrating the development of NPS...and despairing of the fact that today, his book is now obsolete! So we herald the approach of the Ultimate Question 2.0.

Developments driven by company engagement with the Net Promoter discipline has really moved the needle forward from the time that the original book was authored. This is to be applauded because without growth, development and innovation, ideas stagnate. And one of these new ideas, is how to create a frugal WOW, or an enrichment of the relationship.

Fred highlighted some key companies who have done a great job creating frugal WOWs - where you can make a big difference without giving away the family silver...

Zappos - they WOWed Fred's daughter with a lifetime of free delivery
TD Bank - volunteers go out in the WOW van, the WOW Squad, visit great customers to celebrate the relationship; developing Penny Arcade - making coin counting into a game; providing free pens - not chained to the desk!
jetBlue - offering one-way pricing, checking first bag for free, free TV, candor about delays, help with your carry-on, TSA co-ordination, comfortable seating with legroom, the pilot welcomes the passengers in person - not just over the intercom...and the pilot even helps to clean up the plane!
American Express - they've really thought about the emotional touchpoints where they can over-deliver and they've done this in a very systematic way. And they welcome people, with true sincerity.
Apple - through the Genius Bar, the iPad Activation Table and 1-2-1 assistance
At Travel Counsellors, Fred presented a BMW to the best customer service agent - with the most 10s! At it wasn't just the agent who was happy - but the owners! Happy, excellent employees make happy, loyal customers who spend more and come back time and time again. And Fred shared a video about the company and talked about the 10 golden actions that they train their franchisees in to provide those frugal WOWs. Small touches - but very impactful.
Rackspace have created Fanatical Service...

And finally, as an intro to Dan Cathy, Fred spoke about Chick-fil-A.

What a great story about Jose mopping the floor and entertaining the children. Those kids want to go back every week!
Bad biscuits? Reported by a detractor, that person was invited in to help them develop a better recipe.

Now Fred often talks about Chick-fil-A. And some people think he's kooky on the subject. But work done by independent research of restaurants...the proof of the pudding is in the eating. They have the best NPS and some of the highest growth rates in the industry.

So maybe we should say, the proof of the chicken sandwich is in the eating!

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How to Leverage Promoters for Business [and your Career!] - Kathleen Stringfield: Lawson Software

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 20:23:37 GMT

Want a good career enhancement trick using Net Promoter? Then use this simple trick from Kathleen Stringfield of business software giant, Lawson, who presenting some smart ideas on how to leverage your promoters - customers who'd recommend you.

Simply drop a copy of The Ultimate Question (version 2.0 coming out later this year) on the desks of all your C-Suite colleagues – with a little personal note in the inside jacket.

Before you know it, you may find yourself Global Director of Customer Experience, managing your company’s newly set up Customer Experience Office.

You could also do far worse than adopt Kathleen’s practical tips for delivering a promoter-first customer experience program that drives business improvement (NPS increase 13% in 12 months):

Keep it simple: 2 Question Survey for 4 Business Areas (Overall Rating).
- How likely are you to recommend Lawson [Products, Training, Professional Services, Support, Overall) to a friend or colleague?
- What is the most important improvement that would make you rate higher?

Focus single mindedly on delivering a superior customer experience (not a good experience, but a better (and different) experience (than competitors)

Leverage Promoters in two ways
- Listen to them (set up advisory groups, initiate a voice of the customer initiative, create a customer experience officer)
- Activate them - turn promoters who would recommend into promoters who do recommend
  - Understand the dynamics of influence (Cialdini) to turn promoters who would recommend into promoters who do recommend
  - Systematically collect promoter testimonials and integrate them into customer reference programs

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NPS + Innovation = Success @ Suddenlink

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 19:58:15 GMT

Informative and lively was how I would describe the third session of the Innovation: Taking a New Approach track, Customer-Driven Innovation, with Gibbs Jones from Suddenlink sharing NPS Plus Innovation – Watch What Happens. He identified that he took a Transactional NPS approach and he calls it a journey for his company as they used a staged regionally based method. The data he captured was used in three ways:

Innovation – He identified ways to link the customer feedback to his workforce management systems to see the relationships between the two.

This helped prioritize a number of innovation initiatives including changing appointment procedures, defining a universal welcome kit for customers, and making product enhancements to their DVR

Employee Engagement & Commitment – When reviewing the customer survey data, they found that there was plenty of positive feedback that could be shared with front line employees. So Suddenlink made changes in their business to provide commendations to customer service representatives that were identified by the respondent and scrolling positive verbatim on call center message boards.
Social Media – This has been a growing area for Suddenlink to focus on when they looked at innovation and how they can take actions and add value that were found through their NPS program and leverage social media communication avenues to make the change visible. They built a process to leverage social media areas, and discovered so many “splinter” social media venues they needed to monitor and track.

Gibbs mentioned that his organization and its responsibilities has grown as a result of Suddenlink’s use of the data and the amount of interest that Suddenlink regions had once they saw the power they can harness with their NPS program.

A job well done I say!

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Allianz Life - Are You Making Your Own People Happy

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 19:35:29 GMT

Mary Currier, Vice President, IT Relationship Management at Allianz, took the last breakout session of the track "Influencing Who Matters".

Allianz is a global insurance company - one of the largest in the world. Headquartered in Germany, a key focus has been on IT Internal Customer Satisfaction. NPS is key in their external customer base, but Mary chose to share the internal story. Most companies shy away from sharing this data, so it is to be applauded that Mary stepped up.

In 2008, employee engagement and customer satisfaction scores were at an all time low. Through a specific focus, they raised this in 2009 by a small amount but they decided to take a bigger focus in 2010. The goals?

Increase customer satisfaction by 25%
Increase employee engagement by 10%

The 3 key workstreams for the internal employee engagement focused on:

Process and structure
Innovation and change
Attract and retain top talent

As part of this program, they started involving employees more proactively in the areas that were publicising the IT department's reputation including employee driven IT showcases and more employees taking part in specific speaking events to name just two areas.

Additionally, the IT Relationship Management Team put more emphasis on aligning with the business, driving service improvements and aligning the employee experience with the customer experience by understanding and championing both groups.

The process for the approach to this was well defined into 7 key steps:

Design Focus Groups and/or Survey
- 2009: 3 focus groups defined: most tenured employees, administrative assistants, business experts
- 2010: the focus groups were redefined as high volume IT users and key business stakeholders
- With the survey, they adopted NPS and simplified it down into 5 questions - where the design was driven by the focus groups to ensure alignment
Conduct Survey and Focus Group
- Bi-annual surveys in June and November
- Focus groups were held in 2009 to discuss Service Desk and in 2010, the focus group input helped to rewrite the main questions.
Analysis and Reporting
- NPS categories were used
- Data was sorted by BU and survey participants
- Responses were aligned to appropriate IT business relationship owner
- Scores were calculated on overall IT score, question, BU and business relationship owner
- And all responses - especially verbatim comments - were thoroughly reviewed by the team
Conducting Feedback Calls
- All detractors were called back, 1-2-1, to understand the comments and concerns
- Voice of the Customer was placed front and centre. It was new to listen to "customers" and it uncovered a lot of really actionable data
Developed Improvement Plans
- These were based around key complaints areas
  - Lack of knowledge on the Service Desk
  - Resolution was too slow and to error-prone
  - IT was too complicated to work with
- Service improvements were made through 6 work streams including Production Support, Ease of Doing Business, Platform Stability etc
Reporting Results
- Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!
- All IT staff received results
- Directors took ownership for this and loved being part of the solution
Execute Improvement Plans
- Validation of the results with Focus Groups
- Bi-weekly customer satisfaction meetings held for status updates
- Temperature checks made with users
- Monitoring of progress

This led to performance improvements which, in turn, drove perception improvements between 2009 and 2010 in the key areas including:

Service Desk - scores improved from -31% to +71%
Stability & Performance - scores improved from -45% to +37%
Project Delivery - scores improved from -33% to +44%
Business Solution Planning - scores improved from -31% to +23%
Partnership - scores improved from -9% to +72%

Action had been taken in all of the key areas of IT service delivery, but perhaps one of the biggest areas of improvement came from bringing the IT Service Desk in house again.

The results of the efforts made have resulted in:

Engagement Scores increased from 65% to 88% by 2010
They won best place to work awards in 2009 and 2010
2010 results become a foundation for 2011
In 2011, customers are now asking for IT to help them transform their businesses!

Thanks, Mary! This is an amazing success story and - now that more and more companies want to measure internal services - a great case study to understand how to measure and improve within all businesses.

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Brambles - The Cascade Effect of Closing the Loop (some prickly moments, but a great success story!)

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 18:37:14 GMT

Brambles is an interesting company - over $5billion in revenue, in multiple companies across the world and with 1000s of employees. Under their umbrella, CHEP represents about 80% of their revenue. And today, we were treated to Carey Sealy, Director of Customer Loyalty Programs at Brambles, taking us into their world of customer-centricity.

CHEP are in the world of pallet pooling and, in what was becoming a more competitive environment, developed their Net Promoter Program towards the end of 2009 as they felt that they were falling behind the curve.

CHEP's commitment is very much towards providing a quality customer experience. The first step was to really engage their customers in a partnership towards this goal. Named "The 10 Customer Experience", the program is global with CEO leadership and regionally based champions. The launch of this initiative really took the organisation from being a metrics-based company to operationalising a customer experience discipline, using Net Promoter, and focusing on:

Discipline - not metric
Operational - not research
Business Outcome - growth
Central to the Strategy - part of the companhy DNA
Customer sometimes wins - a mutually beneficial relationship
Create more Promoters - improving the overall experience

Key to Carey's approach was to create a strong governance group which included a Global Customer Experience and Insight Council, a Regional Program Steering Committee, functional NPS champions, Sales and Service NPS champions, a feedback Taskforce, all underpinned by the central program team - which is actually Carey herself.

Sometimes organisations get so excited about the program, they forget the steps and end up going "Ready, Fire, Aim!" Oops! But not Carey and CHEP. They adopted a "Ready, Set, Go!" approach, making sure they had put the right plans in place before kicking off. And that included a big focus on data integrity. Carey was disarmingly honest when she touched on this, "our contact integrity was horrible!" But with focus on this area, they were able to clean up the data and get the relevant customer feedback.

Once they had feedback, it was time to turn Insight in Action. Analysis of the information was key - but what was the closed loop process going to look like?

Every Passive and Detractor will be contacted by the Task Force
Every Decision Maker will get a callback from the Leadership Team
Every Customer will receive feedback in person
All feedback will be used to drive and validate the strategic initiative creation process and the annual improvement projects
Accountability
- Every department was engaged through workshops on customer centricity prior to surveying
- Every employee will carry at least one objective around customer centricity and loyalty.

CHEP have both a relationship and a transactional survey. The relationship is about understanding the overall perception from the customer, and the transactional measures interaction with the call centre. And the closed loop process applies to both feedback channels.

Today, CHEP has 22 customer-focused projects, 10 of which are directly related to a customer loyalty driver. They have one key initiative focusing on 5 key functions or processes. 4 key policies have been re-examined and made more customer-friendly. They've made not just operational change but also structural change - such as in product quality.

Their focus on customer experience has driven improvements in the company's reputation and has helped them to increase their emphasis on innovation. The work on contact integrity has paid dividends in terms of providing a more stable data environment.

And most importantly, the customer experience focus has led to the re-organisation of teams that make it easier for the customer to do business, improved service offerings and better solutions.

And the confirmation of success? Just read the verbatim comments from their customers. And it's wonderful to know that the partnership of Satmetrix with CHEP, has helped to fuel this success. Carey - it's been great to work with you!

As a final note - and somewhat of an aside - blogging a session on this track was made doubly enjoyable by the dulcet tones of Tom Graves, Director of Customer Service at Carolina Biological. I'm looking forward to Tom's story next year. Time to step up to the plate, Tom!

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Have you been to Chick-fil-A?

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 18:08:45 GMT

I decided to "Eat Mor Chickin" on January 20, on my first visit ever to a Chick-fil-A. I’ve heard a lot about this fast food chain from Fred Reichheld, who writes about the company’s customer-centric philosophy. But there are no stores yet where I live, so I jumped at the opportunity to try it out.

We were on a customer visit in Roseville, California, just outside of Sacramento, and as we exited the freeway two of my colleagues (Dave had lived in Atlanta, and Brent is from San Antonio) pointed out the Chick-fil-A restaurant right across the road.

I insisted that we stop for a snack after our meeting. It was time for me to see, first hand, what all the fuss was about.

Before we arrived, Brent started singing the praises of the Chick-fil-A restaurants in San Antonio. "When they have a long line of cars in the drive thru, they have people outside with headsets to take orders. And they bring samples out, either when you are waiting or when they have a new product coming out. They do Halloween contests, elementary school nights to support school fundraising. Community is huge for them."

Well, there were no lines or samples when we arrived after our business meeting. The restaurant was inviting from the outside. Nice and clean, and I could visibly see a play area for kids inside. But it was nothing unusual.

Some special touches appeared, though, when we went inside.

What I remember first and foremost was the smiling crew behind the front counter. When we arrived, there was another couple in front of us, but one employee at the counter was available, and she smiled and invited us to place our order. After ordering, Dave struck up a conversation with another employee at the front, Aaron. Aaron was one of those people who was probably born with a smile on his face. You know the old adage about it taking more muscles to frown than to smile? This guy proves the point. He was also well dressed with a tie on. We felt happy to be there, partly because we could tell he and his colleagues were happy to be there too.

The next thing that struck me was the chicken. It was tasty, yes, but the more important thing was the fact that it was real chicken. This was most obvious when I tried the nuggets that Brent had ordered. I bit into one, and you could tell it was real white meat. Totally different from the indescribable "chicken-ish" nuggets that you get at some other fast food chains. Another little plus on this point.

But the thing that sealed the deal for me was the fresh flowers. I didn’t notice them at first. But when I stopped in the restroom and washed my hands, I was surprised to see a huge bouquet of fresh chrysanthemums on the countertop. Then I noticed that, in fact, every table had a simply appointed vase with a fresh carnations in it—a small touch that was totally unexpected for a fast dining experience.

On the way in, I had asked another colleague, Chris, to take a few photos for me without being to conspicuous. But after the flowers and the great service, I felt my visit would not be complete without a

picture of Aaron at the front counter:

"Excuse me, could I ask a favor?" I started. "I’m going to be introducing Dan Cathy, President of Chick-fil-A, at a conference in a couple of weeks. Would it be OK if we took your picture?"

Back came that big smile. "Sure thing," he said. So as I thanked him for the favor, we caught a last snapshot and headed back to Bay Area, wondering…when we will be able to "Eat Mor Chikin" again?