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.