Martyn Christian, Vice President, Marketing & Content Management at FileNet shared with us his journey of deploying an enterprise-wide customer loyalty program.

When embarking on the program, they had the following goals:

• Increase Promoter population
• Increase customer and partner loyalty
• Increase revenue & profitability
• Increase sales efficiency
• Build barriers to entry for competitors

Previously they had a fragmented customer relationships model and no way to evaluate customer experience. Since deploying their program they have enjoyed a 26% increase in NPS, increased revenue, and growing profits.

Some of the best practices included:

• Based on customer feedback, they developed 32 company wide improvements and shared this plan with their customers. That is another common success factor shared by many – communicating results and action plans with your customer.
• The CEO laid out a strategy to drive financial performance including a customer loyalty goal for all employees. Can you say executive sponsorship?
• They involved all employees with customers, from engineers to executives. The CEO even took to this seriously enough to review customer satisfaction issues on a global call every Monday morning. Now, that’s organizational alignment!
• They defined a strategy map where they clearly tied growth to enhancing customer value, and operational goals were defined from the customer prospective (based on real customer feedback).
• Immediate action was taken with customers that scored 6 or less. The response would be reviewed and assigned it to someone to call the customer immediately. Sounds like accountability to me.

Filenet created customer advocacy to the point where in one story they had a customer willing to go to the boardroom and promote a multi-million dollar purchase vs. a competitor offer for “free”. The customer was successful in selecting Filenet and shortly afterwards IBM acquired Filenet for $1.6B. Now that’s results.

Their #1 learning was that this is a change for the people inside the company. Emphasize accountability, goals and educating people so they are able to deliver. Some other tips offered:

• Don’t over complicate, keep it simple
• Create strong transition/change management – remember it takes time
• Share information across all disciplines – find the change agent
• Rethink functional roles and responsibilities
• Integrated into compensation
• Do not call this program or initiative, it’s a way of doing business
• Prepare the company – education through out the organization

For more details, read about their Net Promoter program with Satmetrix.