Rounding out the Hi-Tech track, Tabitha Dunn, Director of Customer Insights for Citrix Online - the home of such celebrated projects as GoTo Meeting, GoTo Assist and GoTo Webinar - shared some insights about how NPS can be a driver of corporate priorities.

In the case of Citrix Online, the driver was product development and innnovation.

Tabitha gave us a veiled look at the projected numbers for a top-secret new project coming from Citrix Online. We were able to see the projections, but we don't know what the product is...yet. We got the distinct impression that the new product might hit digital shelves in about a month or so. Exciting!

Tabitha took the time to answer a lot of participant questions -- so much so that we had a mic runner in the room the entire time, but here are a few top-level take-aways:

• Make sure you ask what people really want. And when you ask, get to the bottom of why they want what they want. Delivering on the wrong want/need can deliver low NPS scores. Tabitha gave the example of Citrix Online's customers asking for a smart phone client for their GoTo MyPC product. On the surface, it appeared that people wanted to be able to visit their computer desktops from their smart phone. But, when asked why they wanted to be able to do this and pointing out that the screen would be very tiny, etc., it turns out that users wanted to be able to access files in case they forgot them while traveling, for instance. (I personally think that some sort of file transfer product is what Citrix Online is launching in a month or so - some sort of GoTo MyFiles or something - but I can't be sure and certainly have no inside knowledge of such. It would be a good move for them though.)
• Tabitha said, "The 'money' question is: how can we get from a 5 to a 10?" Meaning, the true value to a company's NPS program lies in figuring out how to drive improvement.
• After seeing the various financial models and NPS/CX programs they've built, I chimed in and asked how long it took them to achieve what they've done. Her answer: 11 months and 2 full-time active team members. Wow, way to go Citrix.

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Deborah Eastman – Satmetrix

It’s always a please to hear Deborah speak. In the past I’ve been fortunate enough to have her teach part of my NPS Certification class. One of the great things about Deborah is that she has really walked the talk. When she speaks it’s from real experience of implementing NPS programs in complex, international B2B environments prior to her joining the Satmetrix team.

During this session we heard a about Deborah’s time with Bearing Point and the successful NPS-based key account program she introduced. It was a really interesting insight to hear that when returning there some years later on a consulting engagement she saw exactly the same issues and customer feedback were still present in the business. They had been unable to leverage all the excellent feedback they had and move to action.

If there was one thing Deborah wanted us to catch it was the need to act.

Deborah outlined that B2B account relationships are complex. In B2C everyone is (mostly) equal but in B2B we have to focus on who is the decision maker, who are the influencers, who are the end users. In addition, often overlooked, your account management organization is often equally complex. Stitching those two organizations together in an operational program is really the key challenge:

• this complexity gives us multiple points of potential failure, that can impact the whole account. But also lot’s of opportunities to delight.
• We have to be cautious that without an NPS program we have a biased view of B2B relationships -> Account teams are not always facing the reality of the health of the relationships

In that context Deborah emphasized again that this is not a research project – it must be an operational program to open the dialogue, and one that’s not related to a sales opportunity or a service intervention. It’s not a survey to calculate a score; it’s a way in which you engage with customers in a continuous improvement cycle:

1. Contact selection and recruitment

2. Non-response alert follow-up

3. Team review and action planning

4. Account closed loop

5. Structural action and communications

Coming back again to the internal account team structure, Deborah then spent time highlighting that the account team is not just the sales organization – we have to include all the key players that interact with the accounts, e.g. service and support organizations, regional/general management, etc. Looking at the typical concerns amongst those different groups really gave an insight into how the success of the account is a shared responsibility.

Towards the end Deborah pulled out a few key points that we’d do well to track in our own programs:

• Active recruitment of customers into the program is key to drive response rates from the right contacts. Don’t drop a survey on them without warning. It has to be described in terms of how it’s part of the ongoing relationship, and that it is not just a survey.
• It’s about engaging employees to collect and exploit the feedback - not about having them sit on the side lines watching the score. Be cautious in tying compensation to the scores too early – it will just drive employees towards gaming the system
• Watch response rates carefully – less than 50% response rates means your teams are not engaging and you are not capturing a good picture of the real situation.But take care it’s representative of the different roles also (decision maker, influencer, end user) - it’s no good if all responses are from one population.

In summary:

• these programs are here to drive to growth (it’s not about a survey, so change your vocabulary)
• it’s about dialog not the score, the score comes from the actions we make
• action has to come at all levels throughout the organization to be effective at transforming the relationship

So, another great session and a good close to today’s B2B track!

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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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One of the most exciting things about Net Promoter is that in building your NPS, you create a tremendous asset. Promoters will not only buy from you, and keep buying for you--they are are also far more likely to:

- refer business to you

- take reference calls and site visits

- provide testimonials (check out these impressive video testimonials from Intel's website.)

- participate on yoru social media sites

- say great things about you on other social media sites

- speak about you at industry events

- engage in customer co-design

- participate in advisory boards

- participate in marketing and advertising and initiatives

In other words, you have a community of highly credible sources that can help improve your sales, marketing and branding efforts in measurable ways.

I think the next great question for NPS is, "How do we organize our promoters into customer reference programs, advisory boards, online and in-person customer communities, executive forums, and other customer engagement efforts to create even more mutual value for them and for our firm?"