Barry Saik shared the experience of Intuit in using NPS to drive product design and user experience.

As anyone who has read The Ultimate Question knows, Intuit has embraced NPS as a key metric of the business. When getting started, they debated whether to invest in competitive benchmarking.  Barry's advice to anyone starting on the NPS journey is to invest the time in mapping yourself relative to your competitors on the growth vs. NPS charts from Fred's book, The Ultimate Question.

Another best practice Barry stresses is to use your verbatim comments. When reviewing verbatim comments in more detail you can gleam insights that your survey may not produce. Some tips he offered:

• Categorize verbatim comments, ranking themes to provide further analysis of common concerns or opportunities. He shared their own experiences on how the verbatim comments are used to drive product development.
• Intuit uses a product from Informative that allows the users to "vote" on responses from other customers. This allows an organization to find the top of mind issues they may not have previously offered as options on the survey.
• Don't let your teams suggest it takes too much time. Print out the comments and comb through them for that nuggets your customers share.

It's important as well to look at issues that can affect your data. He shared a number of charts that breaks down their NPS scores by product line and seasonality. Understanding the context of your customer's responses increases your ability to use the data in a relevant manner. A prime example we can all relate to was their NPS scores relative to the tax season. By time-analysis they have found that NPS declined as the tax season progresses since early users are likely to have returns vs. those of us that wait till the last minute to write that check to Uncle Sam.

Another way Intuit is leading the pack in building Promoters is through their community site, The Inner Circle.  This is an online community where they can engage with promoters in a richer way.  They have found the members enjoy community participation and sharing their ideas with other customers, giving them a great community for building promoters and collecting insights for product development. An unexpected side effect of this community is a 4.5 star rating on Amazon largely driven from customers that had early access to products.

Intuit has clearly embraced customer centricity and is seeing the results. One of my favorite comments from Barry today was "If you do the right thing and listen to people, they will get on your side and help you out." Too many organization are doing what they think is the right thing for their business and need to re-engineer around doing the right thing for their customers.

We wrapped up Day one with a panel discussion moderated by Richard Owen with executive participation from Charles Schwab, GE Real Estate, and Mellon Investor Services. In their opening comments, each of the panelists shared a summary of where they are today regarding NPS.

Troy Stevenson of Charles Schwab shared important insight from "Chuck." In a recent meeting, Chuck indicated that focusing on the customer was a guiding principle for how they built the business and lack of focus in the organization caused it to lose their way: an important lesson for all of us as the business grows and your attention moves from customer-centric to financial-centric metrics.

Bernhard Klein Wassink of GE Real Estate shared how they found the need to build both a marketing and loyalty focus. Bernhard has built the marketing organization based on the insights they found from their customer feedback processes.

Barton Hill of Mellon Investor Services shared his challenges of being in a mature, competitive market where supply exceeds demand. They started on an NPS journey as a result of identifying ways to differentiate. While traditional market research gave them initial customer insight, they needed a continuous process for evaluating customer pain points and delivering relevancy.

Richard started the discussion with the question of how well the organization embraces customer centricity as a core value. All responses clearly demonstrate customer centricity as a core value.  Mellon found that market research data was not timely enough to engage the organization and they find value in real-time feedback. GE found that value in simplicity and how the people on the front line were able to take this and run with it. Schwab found that the field was thrilled to see the focus driven from the top.

It's clear that executive sponsorship and focus is critical to success. Yet, when the audience responded to the question of how many organizations have the CEO as the key driver of customer loyalty less than 20% of the room raised their hands!

Next we went on to discuss the elements of program design. Both GE and Schwab have found value in rapidly taking action around detractors as a critical element of their program. Mellon found that most deals come from referrals, so they have focused on driving new business through client references.

There were so many great insights shared, but in the spirit of sharing the most interesting points, here's a summary of other key takeaways:

• Schwab found NPS higher in touchpoint surveys because of the recent interaction
• GE found that promoters had 84% higher likelihood for repeat business
• Mellon was able to double win rates by using NPS to select customer references in new pursuits vs. account team-reported relationship metrics
• All participants suggested you focus on pilots before full rollout
• None of the participants are linking employee loyalty to customer loyalty, yet; all indicated this might be a future initiative.

Throughout the day there has been a great deal of discussion around the correlation of growth and NPS. While there are many factors that drive growth, who can argue that loyal customers drive financial performance? My observation is that the organizations on the stage today truly embrace customer centricity. This may cause them to build better products, improve service touch points and communicate in a more customer-relevant manner. While this may not specifically tie to their NPS measurement programs, they are all factors that improve customer acquisition and retention. Doesn't that mean that building a customer centric enterprise drives profitable growth? Isn't NPS a measure of customer centricity?

Today has been a great day of sharing best practices and lessons learned. I'm looking forward to another exciting day tomorrow including insights from Fred Reichheld, Bain and Intuit.

http://netpromoter.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/archstone_boston_common_thumbnail.jpgParke Pettegrew shared many of Archstone-Smith's innovations in the apartment rental business, which include some very aggressive customer-facing promises.

Parke then asks: How can we be sure we are living the brand promise that we make to our residents?

They want to know how to understand baseline loyalty and understand what drives it. Then they want to translate these into operational improvement.

They have an interesting system to track NPS in parallel with their org chart -- regional EVPs, VP, etc. are compared against each other.

T-Mobile finds that NPS increases with proximity to customer interaction -- it rises significantly (as much as 70%) immediately after a visit to a store, and then begins to drops back as time passes.  Without the positive reinforcement, NPS drops back to nearly 0% over a few months. Lesson -- pay attention to customers!

Other interesting findings:

1. Customers have difficulty articulating why they choose an institution
2. There is enormous switching inertia, even when consumers know they can get a better deal.
3. Consumers are irrational.
4. We thought that people would be attracted to the idea of doing business with a group they own, but the decisions were really based on service and features. They were resistant to the ideas of a relationship, and didn't want one.

From Experian's Laura DeSoto: Include the NPS for each of your customers in their records, so your entire organization can see how well they are being served (or how well they feel they are being served.

http://netpromoter.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/charts.jpghttp://netpromoter.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/charts_1.jpgThe Net Promoter conference is off and running with a full house. We are sitting in a packed room with eager students ready to learn about how companies are applying Net Promoter to drive business performance. Richard Owen shared with us the demographics of our fellow attendees representing several industries from financial services, pharma, consumer goods, industrial and tech companies from all regions of the world including representatives from Latin America, Europe, North America and Australia. The buzz of Net Promoter is clearly spreading across the world.

After a warm welcome from the Satmetrix executives, we got started with Laura DeSoto, SVP of Innovation & Synergy at Experian.

Experian: Discipline and Patience Pays Off in Double-Digit Growth

Experian was faced with a mature market, highly competitive with similar go-to-market models and single-digit growth. Their goal was to differentiate their business by creating a unique customer experience. In today's economy, so many of us face this same challenge.

Laura did an excellent job of sharing their journey, and it's clear these types of programs are a journey. Fortunately for Experian, their journey is paying off. They have successfully doubled their NPS over the last 6 quarters and achieved double digit growth in both revenue and profits in a market of single digit growth. 

Some of the key lessons learned from Laura's journey included:

1. Creation of the brand promise through understanding their customer segments and crafting a promise relevant to those segments.

2. The biggest challenge was organizational alignment. Given that delivery of a superior customer experience is in the hands of each employee, employee engagement is critical. Some of their best practices included:

3. Selection of the right partners to support deployment for ongoing feedback. Experian's criteria included:
   • Reliable methodologies
   • Global sample management with the ability to segment at multiple levels
   • Security & other technology support
   • Reporting capabilities
   • Integration with Siebel CRM system
   • Linkage to business results

My key takeaways:

Alignment across the organization is key and from what we heard today, Experian took this task seriously, providing every employee the tools they need to truly embrace and deliver on the promise.

Another key learning was the patience shown by the Experian leadership. In their first 14 months, they actually saw their scores decline.

Some organizations do not have the patience displayed by Experian and therefore many not have enjoyed the benefits achieved in the last 6 quarters of double digit growth and 100% improvement in customer loyalty! Change takes time and commitment. Impacting NPS and realizing the financial benefits associated with this takes time.

In between the next speaker I'll share with you the other sessions from Das Narayandas and GE Healthcare. Stay tuned....

For more details, read about their Net Promoter program with Satmetrix here: http://www.satmetrix.com/casestudies/experian.htm