Michele Berman – VeriSign

For more than 10 years VeriSign has been at the heart of developing a secure Internet. I think most of us have at some point seen the VeriSign Secured Seal - it was amazed to hear that it’s served over 150 million times a day!

VeriSign’s program journey resonated very strongly with my own experience. Michele outlined that when she began to work on NPS program in VeriSign in 2006 she had to transform an existing loyalty program that just wasn’t working. A proprietary loyalty formula was confusing employees and nobody knew what to do with the results. So in 2008 Michele began implementation of NPS after recognizing the value coming from its simplified model.

Adoption into the organization at all levels was rapid. Launching a customer 1^st initiative Michele highlighted that the program was endorsed at the most senior levels, including with the CEO level, and supported by action planning teams across the business.

The Wave 1 rollout, under the leadership of a central team, focused on quarterly surveys across the complete VeriSign business.They paid particular attention to the trigger for closed-loop follow up. The small size of the central team meant they had to project the resources and time required to implement the follow up, to be sure they could cope with the volume. I think that was a really smart move and would strongly encourage you to do the same – it’s simple to start a survey process but if you’re not prepared to manage the follow-up it can rapidly have the opposite effect on customers whose expectations you’ve just raised, and overwhelm your program before it’s begun.

Michele then highlighted what I though was a great simple and effective economic model that analyzed the impact of their Detractor management processes:

• first track the number of customers triggering follow up
• then track the percentage of those where successful re-contract was made
• then track the percentage of those where a improvement of the customer relationship was felt during the contact -> calculate their current economic value revenue protected
• finally track the percentage of those where additional financial commitment was realized -> verify the additional revenue = revenue generated

Key learning points discussed by Michele from this Wave 1 included:

• involvement across the whole business was really needed. The small central team would never be enough to keep pace with the speed of feedback and the need follow-up
• ‘Would you like a follow-up’ is not a good question. If people say ‘no’ you can’t go further!
• $1.2 m on revenue protected/generated on the initial closed-loop actions gave people a taste for what could be realized if they pushed harder to recall all Detractors

The Wave 2 described by Michele incorporated those points, plus industrialized the process further:

• Strong process flow was setup with clearer roles and responsibilities
• improved training was enabled by real data + case studies and scripts made employees more comfortable
• frequency was moved from quarterly to twice a year -> there wasn’t enough time to really develop actions and make progressive on a quarterly schedule
• the follow-up process was made more robust, with guidelines on how to probe for root-cause + an increased emphasis on empathy during the follow-up

At the conclusion I was really impressed by the how rapidly VeriSign had optimized their speed of follow-up we saw that they moved from a 2-4 week closed-loop timeframe to a 5 day period with the vast majority within the ideal 2-day range. You could really see the positive effect of that in their updated economic model.

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